
Class __L^j 

Book. CCoHc^ 



CH)iW!i^htN°. 



COPyRIGHT DEPosrr. 



YALE STUDIES IN ENGLISH 






ALBERT S. COOK, Editor 



V 



STUDIBS 



JONSON'S COMEDY 



0^*^^^^")^^- 



f,AX.a.cJ.H iR 



ELISABETH WOODBRIDGE, Ph. D. 




LAMSON, WOLFFE AND COMPANY 

Boston, New York, and London 

1898 

L. 






^0(i5G 



Copyright, 1898, 

BY 

ELISABETH WOODBRIDGE, Ph. D. 



COPIED „iUi.i'(;'i: J- 











^ 



CONTENTS. 



ji 



I. Jonson's Theory of Literary Art, .... 
II. The Comedian's Material and His Attitude, . 
III. Character Treatment in Jonson's Typical Comedy, 
IV. Structural Features of Jonson's Typical Comedy, . 

1. General Structure of the Satiro-comic Plot, 

2. Structural Features of Every Man in His 

Humour, ...... 

3. Structural Features of Every Man out of 

His Hicinour, 

4. Structural Features of The Alchemist, . 

5. Structural Features of Volpone, 
V. Jonson's Romantic Comedy, 



5 

21 
28 
40 
40 

46 

55 
60 
64 

73 



Appendix. Brief Discussion of the Comedies not Already 

Treated: 81 

Cynthia's Revels. The Poetaster. Epicoene. Bar- 
tholomew Fair. The Devil Is an Ass. The Staple of 
News. The Magnetic Lady. The New Inn. The 
Case Is Altered. A Tale of a Tub. 

Bibliography, 99 

Index, 102 



CHAPTER I. 



Jonson's Theory of Literary Art. 

The revival of antiquity, with the close study it 
involved of Latin and Greek models, led in England as 
elsewhere to a new sense of the dignity of letters, and 
a new perception of the principles underlying litera- 
ture. But in England this more selfconscious and 
deliberate phase of the renaissance spirit was at first 
expressed fitfully or not at all by the great creative 
writers themselves. Puttenham's treatise,' narrowly 
scholastic as it was, made a beginning, but Puttenham 
himself was a pure theorist and rhetorician. Sidney's 
Defense with its quaint union of humorous good sense 
and an almost boyish fervor, gives us "The poetry 
rather than the art or the theory of criticism." ° Spen- 
ser's treatise is lost to us, and we have only his corre- 
spondence with Harvey/ dealing, in rather a narrow 
spirit, with the minor question of rime and metre; Mar- 
lowe and Shakespeare had the authority but not the 
peculiar mental qualities needed for the formation of a 
corpus of poetic theory. It was with the Jacobean era 
that a writer came to the front who, by virtue of a sin- 
gularly consistent and logical cast of mind, informed 
by genius only less than the greatest, and backed by an 
authority even greater, with his own time, than Shake- 
speare's, worked out a set of principles which, if they 
cannot be called a system, have all the inner consist- 
ency of a system, with much of its rigidity. 

Moreover, Jonson's theory, conscious and deliberate 
though it was, was not therefore external or only par- 



' Puttenham: The Art o/ English Poesie. 

^ Wylie: Evolution cf English Criticism, p. 12. 

3 Haslewood: The Arte 0/ English Poesie. 



6 /onson's Theory of Literary Art. 

tially representative of him. It is in this respect more 
satisfying, though more narrow, than the theory of his 
great successor, Dryden, whose practice was often so sadly 
and bewilderingly at variance with his precepts. For 
Jonson was always honest and serious, and therefore 
consistent, and his work, squaring essentially with 
his principles, serves to illustrate, not to confound 
them. 

With any other type of mind the fact that we get our 
knowledge of his theory largely from a note-book whose 
entries are all undated would be most unfortunate. In 
Jonson's case this is comparatively unimportant, for his 
was a nature that hardened young. He did, indeed, 
pass through a "romantic" period, but once he had 
reached his characteristic standpoint — from the date, 
that is, of Every Man Out of His Humour — he is stationary. 
From that time to the culmination of his art in Volpone 
(or, as some will have it, in The Alchefnist), his power 
grows, but his attitude is unchanged; while in the last 
twenty years of his life, marked as they were by unpop- 
ularity and failure both social and professional, he 
clings with dogged tenacity to his time-worn maxims, 
flinging them in the teeth of his public sometimes 
with arrogant defiance, sometimes with an affectation 
of philosophical indifference that deceives no one. But, 
except for this sharper note of bitterness, the critical 
utterances of his latest prologues and epilogues and 
those of his earliest might have been written on the 
same day — in "these forty years" he has not moved an 
inch, and Donne's words of his writings: — "Nascuntur 
senes"' might almost as truly be applied to their 
author. 

Perhaps no writer has ever had a more exalted con- 
ception of what poetry is and what the poet should be. 
Never were two spirits more unlike than Jonson and 
Sidney, yet, in reading Timber, and often in the plays 
themselves, one is reminded of the Defense, whose argu- 

1 Commendatory verses; Works, I, ccxliv. 



Jonson's Theory of Literary Art. 7 

ment is not unworthily summed up in the two lines, 
given to the younger Ovid: 

" O Sacred Poesy, thou spirit of arts, 
The Soul of Science, and the queen of souls." ' 

And Sidney's spirit speaks in the words: 

" And the high raptures of a happy muse, 
Born on the wings of her immortal thought. 
That kicks at earth with a disdainful heel, 
And beats at heaven's gates with her bright hoofs." ^ 

He is at one with Sidney, too, in his consistent empha- 
sis of the moral end of poetry: — 

"The study of it, if we will trust Aristotle, offers to mankind a 
certain rule and pattern of living well and happily .... inso- 
much as the wisest and best learned have thought her the absolute 
mistress of manners, and nearest of kin to virtue. And whereas 
they entitle philosophy to be a rigid and austere poetry, they have, 
on the contrary, styled poesy a dulcet and gentle philosophy, which 
leads on and guides us by the hand to action with a ravishing 
delight and incredible sweetness."^ 

Indeed when he wrote that he must surely have had 
Sidney in mind, as one of the "wisest and best learned," 
so exactly do his words summarize one whole section of 
the Defense.'' For the poet, Jonson's ideal is correspond- 
ingly high, and he reminds us of Milton as he urges 
that the practice of poesy " should not be attempted 
with unclean hands "' — as he asserts "the impossibility 
of any man's being the good poet without first being a 
good man." ' But if in his emphasis of a strenuous 
morality Jonson was akin to the Puritanism whose fol- 
lies he ridiculed, he was in temper closer to the Puritan 
poet of the later than to him of the earlier age. For 
Sidney's morality was tinged with a mysticism and soft- 



1 The Poetaster; Works, II, 386. - 

« lb. 

3 Timber; Ed. Schelling, p. 74. 

^ Cf. Sidney: Defense 0/ Poesy, Ed. Cook, pp. 11-32. 

^ Volpotie: Dedicatory Letter; Works, III, 156. 

^ lb. Cf. Longinus: On the Sublime, cap. IX. But cf. also, infra, pp. 19, 20. 



8 /onson's Theory of Literary Art. 

ened by a rare and lovely humility that neither Jonson 
nor Milton knew. 

This conviction of Jonson's that the ends of poetry 
are moral — that the poet is, in a strict though high 
sense, a teacher — can scarcely be over-emphasized, for 
though it did not dominate all his work,' it did dom- 
inate all his theorizing. It is one of the fundamental 
points of divergence between his drama and Shake- 
speare's, it marks his kinship with Juvenal and with 
Aristophanes, as well as the far closer kinship with 
Moliere. But as its importance is greatest in deter- 
mining the type of comedy he was to create, it can 
best be taken up in that connection. 

Aside from a lofty morality, then, there go to the 
poet's making two things, natural endowment and good 
training. Neither avails alone, and if Jonson may seem 
to have laid greater emphasis on the second, this is only 
seeming — the natural result, perhaps, of reaction from 
current opinion in which the importance of natural 
gifts had been so over-emphasized as to make some pro- 
test inevitable. 

Jonson's protest is vigorous enough. The poet is 
born, he admits, but he is also made, he must undergo 
training, " and not think he can leap forth suddenly a 
poet by dreaming he hath been in Parnassus, or having 
washed his lips, as they say, in Helicon. There goes 
more to his making than so." ^ But often the note of 
personal bitterness is discernible, as here: 

*' But the wretcheder are the obstinate contemners of all helps and 
arts; such as presuming on their own naturals, which, perhaps, are 

excellent, dare deride all diligence and they utter all they 

can think with a kind of violence and indisposition, unexamined, 
without relation either to person, place, or any fitness else; and the 
more wilful and stubborn they are in it the more learned they are 
esteemed of the multitude, through their excellent vice of judgment, 
who think those things the stronger that have no art."^ 



1 Cf. infra, pp. 28-31. 

"^ Timber, Ed. Schelling, p. 77. 

3 lb., p. j6. 



Jonsons Theory of Literary Art. 9 

That last clause is very keen, and cuts as deep to-day 
as when it was written. He goes on: 

'■ It cannot but come to pass that these men who commonly seek 
to do more than enough may sometimes happen on something that 
is good and great; but very seldom: and when it comes it doth not 
recompence the rest of their ill."' 

Yet, it must be remembered he never departs from 
his fundamental belief that " art " is powerless without 
" nature " — " For, as Sim^^lus saith in Stobaeus, . . . 
without art nature can never be perfect; and without 
nature art can claim no being." ' Once he goes even 
farther, admitting that both painter and poet " are born 
artificers, not made. Nature is more powerful in them 
than study." ' 

Such a position seems inexpugnable, and one is in- 
clined to wonder at the unfairness of the critics who 
have set down Jonson as an advocate of a mechanical 
art, to be followed by rule of thumb. But the critics 
are partly right, though the weak point is, as often, to 
be sought not so much in the theory as in the man be- 
hind the theory. We shall come upon it as we examine 
what he meant by this "art" without which natural 
gifts are wasted. 

Besides "nature," three things help, he says, to form 
the poet: " exercise, imitation and study;"' and these he 
considers in order. 

By " exercise " he means patient labor towards per- 
fection of form, the Horatian idea, expressed, however, 
with a delightful touch of true English humor: 

"Try another time with labor. If then it succeed not, cast not 
away the quills yet. nor scratch the wainscot, beat not the poor desk, 
but bring all to the forge and file again; torn it anew. There is no 
statute law of the kingdom bids you be a poet against your will or 
the first quarter; if it comes in a year or two, it is well."" 



Compare Sidney: Defense of Poesy, p. 46- Both are doubtless follow- 





1 lb. 








-> lb. 


P- 


73. 




3 lb. 


P- 


49. 




4 lb. 


P- 


75- 


ing 


Longinus. 




5 lb. 


P 


76. 



lo Jonsoti's Theory of Literary Art. 

So far, good; but when he ends: " Indeed, things 
wrote with labor deserve to be so read and will last 
their age,"' we protest with a "«^« sequitur." This it 
was which Jonson could never learn — that though per- 
fection is scarcely to be attained without labor, it is not 
necessarily attained by it; that, even if the writer has 
patiently "forged" and "filed," it is often a far cry yet 
to immortality. 

Jonson's use of the term "imitation " is noteworthy. 
He does not mean that the poet is to imitate nature, but 
that he shall " be able to convert the substance or riches 
of another poet to his own use. To make choice of one 
excellent man above the rest, and so to follow him till 
he grow very he, or so like him as the copy may be mis- 
taken for the principal." ^ Here he is closely following 
Longinus, though he has failed to catch the poetic fer- 
vor of his original and so has lost a little of its truth. 
Compare this passage: 

We may learn from this author [Plato], if we would but observe 
his example, that there is yet another path besides those mentioned 
which leads to sublime heights. What path do I mean? The emu- 
lous imitation of the great poets and prose writers of the past. On 
this mark, dear friend, let us keep our eyes ever steadfastly fixed. 
Many gather the divine impulse from another's spirt, just as we are 
told that the Pythian priestess, when she takes her seat on the 
tripod, where there is said to be a rent in the ground breathing up- 
ward a heavenly emanation, straightway conceives from that source 
the godlike gift of prophecy and utters her inspired oracles, so like- 
wise from the mighty genius of the great writers of antiquity there 
is carried into the souls of their rivals, as from a fount of inspiration, 
an effluence which breathes upon them until, even though their 
natural temper be but cold, they share the sublime enthusiasm of 
others."^ 

The fact that in dealing with this all-important phrase 
"imitation of nature," Jonson turned from Aristotle to 
Longinus — from the philosopher and nature-lover to 
the rhetorician and book-lover — is an interesting illus- 



' lb., p. 77. 

2 lb. 

3 Longinus: On the Sttblime, p. 29. 



J orison's Theory of Literary Art. n 

tration of the truth that we get out of books mainly 
what we bring to them. It is only in the present cen- 
tury that we have grown able to give understanding 
attention to those profound first chapters in the Poetics, 
where the relations between art and nature, between 
comedy and tragedy, are touched upon. One would like 
to have had Jonson's comment on Aristotle's dictum 
that comedy presents men as worse than they are,^ and 
on this statement of tragic "imitation": 

" They (portrait painters), while reproducing the distinctive form 
of the o'riginal. make a likeness which is true to life and yet more 
beautiful. So too the poet .... should preserve the type and 
yet ennoble it."'' 

But for thinking along these lines and in this manner 
the time was not yet ripe, and it was, we repeat, most 
significant that with a fundamental problem of ^ art 
staring him in the face, Jonson should have placidly 
ignored it, and been content to adopt a use of the term 
"Imitation" which transferred its application from a 
study of nature— Aristotle's meaning— to a study of 
books— Longinus' meaning. It was a sign of advance 
when Dryden, stimulated by French criticism, seriously 
took up the question, for though his treatment of it 
was shifting and superficial, the recognition of it as^ a 
problem at all marked a step forward on the path of lit- 
erary aesthetics. 

Yet a third thing, in Jonson's opinion, is needed for 
the poet's education: 

" But that which we especially require in him, is an exactness of 
study, and multiplicity of reading, lectio, which maketh a full 
man." ^ 

True, again; yet one cannot help feeling that what 
was true from the pen of his contemporar)^ the scientist- 
philosopher, was not so true from that of the scholar- 

1 Aristotle: Poetics^ II, 4. 

2 lb., XV, 8. 

3 Timlier, p. 77. 



12 Jonsons Theory of Literary Art. 

poet. He would, of course, never have explicitly stated 
that it was reading and reading alone that made the full 
man; yet one feels that this was a blunder he instinct- 
ively fell into, and that it was this mistake, grounded 
in his feeling rather than in his reasoning, that blinded 
him to the poverty of some scenes in his Sejanus, and of 
the greater part of his Catiline. 

We have, then, Jonson's ideal poet, the man whose 
birth "doth ask an age," of lofty morality, whose rare 
natural endowments have been refined and perfected by 
" exercise, imitation and study." In a word, we have a 
portrait of Jonson himself, very honestly given, too, 
with the faults on the surface, as we have seen. In fact, 
he scarcely does himself justice, for he leaves out of 
account — unless he meant to imply it in this unfortu- 
nately vague term 'nature' — the hold on human life 
which he must have had who could produce such char- 
acters as Rabbi Busy and Ursula, Sir Epicure Mammon 
and Volpone. 



If Jonson's love of the written page was sometimes 
his weakness, it was in another way his strength. Schel- 
ling, in his introduction to Timber, suggests that " the 
conscious cultivation of English prose style began to be 
practiced at least a generation before Abraham Cowley 
and John Dryden." ' This is scarcely going far enough, 
for the 'conscious cultivation of prose style ' had begun 
even before Lyly, whose worst extravagance was only 
the reductio ad absurdum of prevailing tendencies from 
which even Sidney was not wholly free. Jonson's merit 
is that he helped to bring the language out of the cul 
de sac into which this had led it, and set it on the high 
road of its true development. It was not merely his 
sensitiveness to the beauty of words in themselves, 
though this too he had: 



1 Timber, Introduction, p. xxv. 



Jonson's Theory of Literary Art. 13 

" Some words are to be culled out for ornament and color, as we 
gather flowers to straw houses or make garlands; but they are better 
when they grow to our style as in a meadow, where, though the mere 
grass and greenness delights, yet the variety of flowers doth heighten 
and beautify."' 

For delightful as "mere grass and greenness" is, 
there was perhaps a little too much of it in the Eliza- 
bethan writing. Nor was it simply the rhetorician's 
feeling for language, though that was strong in him, 
distinguishing "what word is proper, which hath orna- 
ment, which height, what is beautifully translated, 
where figures are fit, which gentle, which strong."* It 
was the sense for what may be called the architectonics 
of style, such as inspired these words: 

" The congruent and harmonious fitting of parts in a sentence hath 
almost the fastening and force of knitting and connection; as in 
stones well squared, which will rise strong a great way without 
mortar."^ _^ 

Perhaps no figure has ever expressed more happily 
the impression that a certain kind of excellence of style, 
in any language, makes upon us. As he wrote that, 
we may be sure that he had in mind besides the Latin 
classics, the example of two men, himself and Bacon. 
He could scarcely have had better models, and through 
them he got at one of the fundamental principles of 
good prose. Of a more delicate temper is this: 

" Periods are beavitful when they are not too long; for so they 
have their strength too, as in a pike or javelin."'* 

Pater might have said that, though only the best of 
Pater's own writing conforms to it: 

Such ideas, expressed with such beautiful adequacy, 
show what his own " imitation " had done for Jonson 
himself. His rare scholarship and fine appreciation of 



1 lb., pp. 61, 62. 

2 lb., pp. 27. 
s lb., p. 62. 
•■lb., p. 62. 



14 Jonson's Theory of Literary Art. 

the best authors had taught him " not to imitate ser- 
vilely, as Horace saith, and catch at vices for virtue," 
and his prose, with Bacon's, must have gone far towards 
establishing a norm of style, not imitated from but 
inspired by the best work of the ancient world, and 
catching some of its dignity and simplicity; — a style 
which led the way to the prose of Milton and Dryden 
and Congreve. 



"Most loving of antiquity" as he was, it is the more 
surprising to find his attitude toward classic standards 
characterized by a sturdy independence of authority as 
such which is truly English and as truly modern. A 
manly discipleship leading to a manly self-reliance, this 
was his ideal: 

" Besides, as it is fit for grown and able writers to stand of them- 
selves, and work with their own strength, to trust and endeavor by 
their own faculties, so it is fit for the beginner and learner to study 
others and the best."' 

Of Aristotle he was not the blind worshiper but the 
reasoning and discriminating, if enthusiastic, follower. 
Nothing can be better, either in style or temper, than 
the passages where he defends his position; there needs 
no apology for the length of the quotations. 

" I am not of that opinion to conclude a poet's liberty within the 
narrow limits of laws which either the grammarians or philosophers 
prescribe. For before they found out those laws there were many 
excellent poets that fulfilled them, amongst whom none more per- 
fect than Sophocles, who lived a little before Aristotle. Which of 
the Greeklings duirst ever give precepts to Demosthenes ? or to 
Pericles, whom the age surnamed Heavenly, because he seemed to 
thunder and lighten with his language? or to Alcibiades, who had 
rather Nature for his guide than Art for his master?"* 

" Nan nimiiim credendum antiqiiitati. — I know nothing can con- 
duce more to letters than to examine the writings of the ancients, 



' lb., p. ss. 

i" lb., pp. 79, 



fonson's Theory of Literary Art. 15 

and not to rest in their sole authority, or take all upon trust from 
them, provided the plagues of judging and pronouncing against 
them be away; such as are envy, bitterness, precipitation, impu- 
dence, and scurrile scoffing. For to all the observations of the 
ancients we have our own experience, which if we will use and 
apply, we have better means to pronounce. It is true they opened 
the gates and made the way that went before us, but as guides, not 
commanders: Noti doiiiini nostri, sed duces fuere. Truth lies 
open to all; it is no man's several. Patet onmibus Veritas; nonduin 
est occupata. Multum ex ilia, etiam ficturis relict itm est} 

Nothing is more ridiculous than to make an author a dictator, as 
the schools have done Aristotle. The damage is infinite knowledt'.e 
receives by it; for to many things a man should owe but a temporary 
belief, and a suspension of his own judgment, not an absolute resig- 
nation of himself, or a perpetual captivity. Let Aristotle and others 
have their dues; but if we can make farther discoveries of truth and 
fitness than they, why are we envied?" * 

In such passages Jonson is at his best. Sane and yet 
bold, trenchant and yet temperate, he gets at the root 
of the matter, and his conservatism, well marked as it 
is, is a rational conservatism, quite distinct from the 
fanatical devotion to the past which prevailed in France 
throughout the sixteenth century. 

Not that he undervalued the great philosopher. " Ar- 
istotle," he says, "was the first accurate critic and truest 
judge, nay, the greatest philosopher the world ever 
had.' And he says elsewhere: "Let us beware, while 
we strive to add, we do not diminish or deface." ' But 
he claimed the right of free thought in the realm of let- 
ters as others had claimed it in the domain of religion, 
and if he made few departures from classic practice 
this was because he had given to the classic standards 
his independent and deliberate assent. It was with 
him a question not of authorities but of truth. 

" I do not desire," he says, " to be equal to those that went before; 
but to have my reason examined with theirs, and so much faith to 



1 lb., p. 7. 
= lb., p. 66. 
3 lb., p. 78. 
< lb., p. 66. 



1 6 Jonsons Theory of Literary Art. 

be given them, or me, as those shall evict. I am neither author nor 
fautor of any sect. I will have no man addict himself to me; but if 

I have anything right, defend it as Truth's, not mine Stand 

for truth, and 'tis enough: Non mt/iz cedettduni, sed veriiati." ' 

In this last phrase is the conclusion of the whole mat- 
ter — "■ Non mihi cedendum, sed veritati" j for one feels that 
his devotion to the classics is indeed the result of a de- 
votion to truth as he saw it, not to a convention or a 
tradition. 

In the rules that he gives for dramatic writing we get 
what is virtually a resume of some of the most striking 
parts of the Poetics. Thus, he says that the poem must 
have "one entire and perfect action,"^ that is, it 
must have "a beginning, a midst, and an end,"' its 
range should be neither too large nor too restricted, 
so it " exceed not the compass of one day." It is 
deeply interesting to see how thoroughly the poet 
has mastered this part of the treatise, and how he 
passes from point to point, condensing here, amplifying 
there, often supplying a particular illustration where 
the Greek had used a general statement, and always 
rendering the spirit as well as the letter of his original. 
He feels the force, for instance, of Aristotle's insistence 
on an inner and organic, as distinct from a superficial 
unity; and while in prescribing the unity of time he 
transforms into a positive requirement Aristotle's some- 
what careless and wholly undogmatic generalization 
from Greek usage, he does not follow this up, as the 
French did, by insisting on unity of place, which Aris- 
totle does not even mention. 

In Jonson's own comedies^ he adheres rather carefully 
to the unity of time, while in one, " The Alchemist," his 
conformity to the unity of place is such as even Cor- 
neille would scarcely have accused of "license."^ For 



' lb., p. 8. Schelling has " veritate," doubtless a misprint. 

2 lb., p. 84. 

3 lb. 

■• E.xcept The Case Is Altered, which is, of course, always to be excepted in any such 
statements as to Jonson's usage. 

* Cf. CorneiUe: Discours III, Des T7-ois Unites. 



Jonsons Theory of Literary Art. 17 

the most part, however, he seems to have been satisfied 
with confining his action to a single city or its environs. 
As to unity of action, he works with a very free — almost 
too free — hand, in marked contrast to Moliere, some of 
whose plays remind one of Schopenhauer's criticism of 
French tragedies " which in general observe this (unity) 
so strictly that the course of the drama is like a geomet- 
rical line without breadth. There it is constantly a case 
of 'Only get on! Pensez a votre affaire!' " ' And what- 
ever perfection of modelling and power of appeal 
Moliere gains by this singleness of aim, Jonson's method 
has its own virtues of breadth and mass.'' 

But it is interesting to find that while in his comedies 
Jonson was thus regular, his usage as a tragedian is dif- 
ferent: Sejanus breaks the unity of time, Catiline con- 
forms neither in place nor time. The noteworthy thing 
is that in thus setting at naught a rule he had himself 
enunciated Jonson was conformirtg to a higher law, 
founded on a fundamental distinction between comedy 
and tragedy. The essence of the tragic lies in the clash 
between will and law, it is found in " the fatality of the 
consequences which follow upon every human act."' 
Now the essence of the comic, whatever it may be, is 
surely not that. For comedy deals with the aspects 
of things, often taken very arbitrarily and in a sense 
very superficially — and rightly so, else there is danger 
of trenching on the tragic. It is, then, necessarily a 
thing of the moment, it has no past and no future, and 
in a play to which it gives the stamp it is natural though 
not necessary that the action should have a brief range. 
Tragedy, on the other hand, is essentially grounded in 
time, and the so-called "tragic incongruity" is not 
tragic by virtue of its incongruity considered apart. 
Hamlet face to face with the unknown may— Mr. Dow- 
den notwithstanding' — be as legitimately a comic as a 



' Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Idea, III, ai6. 

^ Cf. the discussion of Every Man in His Humour, infra pp. 46-ff. 

3 Amiel: Journal, April 6, 1851. 

^ Dowden : Shakespere — His Mind and Art, p. 352. 

2 



1 8 Jonsons Theory of Literary Art. 

tragic spectacle; it is when one views him as a nucleus 
of causes and results that the tragic element appears. 
For its source is not in juxtaposition but in movement, 
in struggle; it has, in a word, development.' That many 
comedies violate the unities and many tragedies observe 
them, proves nothing. In Shakespeare's comedies, for 
example, the extension in time has to do with the seri- 
ous plots of the plays, it does not affect the comic scenes, 
which are set like so many separate pictures, — or in 
which, we may say more truly, the poet relinquishes for 
the moment the serious attitude and chooses to look at 
things for their superficial incongruities.'^ The events 
of a tragedy, on the other hand, can indeed be com- 
pressed into a brief time; we do not deny this, only 
maintaining that the time element is necessary. For 
even in such a tragedy as Oedipus King, where the action 
covers only a few hours, it is not until we have in spirit 
lived over a life's past, and felt forward into its future, 
that we get the bitterness of the tragedy crushed into 
those few hours. 

Jonson's usage in his comedy and his tragedy becomes 
thus very significant. For, especially in the case of 
Sejanus — which, despite the critics, seems in many ways 
a very wonderful play — he would have lost greatly in 
effectiveness if he had tried to force the action into nar- 
rower limits. The play is built up round the two titanic 
figures, Sejanus and Tiberius, and its tragic forces are 
found in the development of the inner purposes of these 
two, out of a state of harmony into one of complete and 
deadly opposition, ending in the final overthrow of the 
favorite. Such a theme could scarcely have been treated 
in any shorter time than Jonson has given it, and that 
he felt this and conformed, consciously or unconsciously, 
to a higher than the written law, is a sign of his real 
greatness. 



1 In this connection, Of. infra pp. 37-8 

2 Cf. Everett: Poetry, Comedy and Duty, Chap. II. 



Jonsons Theory of Literary Art. 19 

In studying Jonson's literary theory one is impressed 
by two things. First, one is surprised at the extent to 
which he had assimilated the Greek aesthetics, as 
embodied in Aristotle, so far as they touched upon ques- 
tions of poetic form. In his interpretation of the 
Poetics he might have given lessons to Corneille and to 
Dryden. One has only to compare, for example, the 
utterances in Timber with those in Corneille's essays on 
the three unities, to see the difference between think- 
ing that is vital, if crude, and thinking that is 
shackled with conventions. Second, one feels more and 
more strongly as one's acquaintance with him deepens, 
that while as regards form his theory was Greek in its 
reasonable temperateness, he was himself by tempera- 
ment a Roman of the stoic type. More than enough 
has been said of his borrowing from antiquity, but what 
has not been suiificiently emphasized is the intellectual 
processes behind this "borrowing," which determine its 
significance. He did not copy the Roman writers, he 
identified himself with them; he did not steal their 
thoughts, he thought them and felt them; and when he 
used their words it was because no fitter ones would 
naturally occur to him. In the Timber, as elsewhere, 
one passes from Jonson to Seneca and back to Jonson 
without consciousness of a transition, and it is no dis- 
credit even to the critical reader if he now and then 
takes for Jonson's own some passage that is really a trans- 
lation or a paraphrase from a Roman classic. In a genu- 
ine sense, the thought is really Jonson's own, being made 
so by right of complete assimilation. Therefore what 
might have been pedantry in another is natural and legiti- 
mate in him. Not that he was wholly free from pedant- 
ry, but his undeniable vanity with regard to his classic 
learning has created a false impression that he was only 
a copyist. Thus, in Sejanus the array of references in 
the foot-notes is calculated to make one assume that the 
whole thing is a transcript from the Roman writers. In 
one sense, this^is the case, but if one goes to the sources 



20 Jonson's Theory of Literary Art. 

thus pointed out, one finds that the entire mass of his 
material has been worked over and scarcely is one stone 
left upon another. There is, it is true, hardly an inci- 
dent of importance in his play which cannot be found 
in Suetonius, or Tacitus, or Dion Cassius; but his 
arrangement, his elaboration, his emphasis, his selection 
— all these are his own. In a few instances he has trans- 
ferred a huge block of material from Tacitus to his own 
play;' for the rest, he has simply saturated himself with 
the spirit of the period he is writing about — "sich darin 
eingelebt " — so that his play, though for many reasons 
not a model tragedy, seems to have been, not copied 
from Tacitus, but written with the spirit of Tacitus 
upon him. 

No one can study Jonson's theory as set forth in Tim- 
ber and interpreted by his other works, without wonder 
at his power, his breadth, his grip on vital issues. And 
the more one perceives this, the more one feels the 
essential contrast between his mind and Dryden's, 
whose catholicity of taste and breadth of literary phi- 
losophy seems in part only one phase of a vacillating 
impressibility due to the want of a central point of view. 
This central point of view Jonson had attained, and it 
is for this reason that his Timber, despite its apparent 
lack of order, makes upon us the impression of a uni- 
fied whole. Nor is his the superficial consistency of a 
narrow mind. His perception that truth is higher than 
authority, that laws are generalizations, not causes, his 
suggestion of the historic method in dealing with 
antiquity, prove him a philosophic and vital thinker. 
And when we call him a classicist we are right only if 
we recognize the term in its best significance — as the 
symbol not of a narrow and mechanical scholasticism 
but of a legitimate and honorable mode of thought 
based on a perception of the beauty of order and sym- 
etry in the things of the imagination as in the things 
of the reason. 

' He does this in the speeches of Tiberius and some of those of Sejanus, and in the 
long defense of Cremutius Cordus; these are all. 



CHAPTER II. 



The Comedian's Material and His Attitude. 

In one of Jonson's plays, the revellers, borrowing of 
the gods their names and powers, gather round the ban- 
quet-table and with Jove at their head hold Olympian 
festival. In the midst there breaks in the earthly mon- 
arch, imperial Caesar, and the "quire of gods" is con- 
founded. Even so does Jonson appear late among the 
Elizabethan poets, and even so does he scorn their 
divinity in his sentence: "Men are decayed, and 
studies," ' even so does he ignore it in his contempt for 
a world that he deems " sick and infirm," whose " old 
age itself is a disease." ^ 

In thus drawing apart from his fellows Jonson chal- 
lenges with peculiar directness the judgment of all who 
love the literature of the age he condemned. How far 
was he right in his condemnation? Wherein was he dif- 
ferent from the rest? Which could most truly claim 
divinity ? What must be our final estimate of him ? It 
is in attempting to answer such questions as these that 
the following pages have been written. 

It is unfortunate that we have but the one word- 
comedy— by which to designate many things. It serves 
to denote alike the comic element in a play, or the play 
itself of which the comic element may be but a small 
part; we use it to designate in turn the work of Shake- 
speare, of Jonson, of Aristophanes. Yet the huge laugh- 
ter of' the Greek, and its reckless abandonment; the 
"slim, feasting smile " of Moliere; the chuckle of Lear's 
sad-eyed fool;— these are, it would seem, more diverse 
the one from the other than are some smiles from some 



1 Tivtber, p. 7. 
" lb., p. 12. 



22 The Comedian s Materia/ and His Attitude. 

tears. We feel this, yet the name of comedy clings to 
them all, and it is perhaps partly this accident of a com- 
mon title that has led critics to talk of Shakespeare and 
Jonson and Aristophanes as if they could be reduced to 
a single term and judged by a single standard. 

Certain things, indeed, they do have in common. The 
comic standpoint always has a certain detachedness of 
view, in virtue of which one stands off from the object 
and perceives its incongruities as such, and the basis of 
all comedy is this perception of incongruity. The basis 
of dramatic comedy in particular is a perception of the 
incongruities found in human life, for those comic 
effects whose material is words and concepts and which 
are roughly designated by the term wit, are not distinct- 
ively dramatic but belong to all forms of literary 
expression. 

Dramatic comedy, then, dealing with the comic aspect 
of human life, may be considered in two ways: with 
reference to its material, or with reference to the 
author's attitude. As to its material, there are two 
realms of comic effect furnished by life: those of inci- 
dent and of character. As to the author's attitude, he 
may view his material with a regard varying between 
the sympathetic and the satiric, and he may see in 
his subject the individual, or the type, or the one 
in the other. Our final judgment of a comedy will 
be determined by our judgment of it in these two 
ways. 

The distinction between incident and character may, 
indeed, be objected to on several grounds. Henry 
James does object to it. "What is character," he says, 
"but the determination of incident? What is inci- 
dent but the illustration of character ? " ' Yet though 
this is as true of some comedy as it is in novel-writing 
about which he is talking, it is not true of all. There 
are comedies of incident with no differentation of 
character whatever, or only the most conventional sort; 



' Henry James: The Art of Fiction, p. 69. 



The Comedian' s Material and His Attitude. 23 

and there are comedies where the weight of emphasis 
at least is on the exposition of characters, who stand 
still and pose to be drawn. The two kinds of effects 
may be found in a primitive form in our modern vari- 
ety show. Here a mad succession of surprising 
tumbles, beatings, whacks on the head and trippings-up 
of the feet of the comic butt, is planned to keep the 
audience in a roar. It does not matter what sort of 
person he is to whom these things happen; the em- 
phasis is on the event itself, not on the character of the 
recipient, and the comic element is found in the incon- 
gruity between anticipation and actual occurrence. On 
the other hand the laughter that arises at sight of the 
huge, misshapen figure of some made-up monstrosity 
has a slightly different source: it is based in the percep- 
tion of a departure from some standard, which is as- 
sumed as the norm. The fat or the thin man the very 
tall or very short man, is funny not in himself, but when 
mentally compared with the normal man who is neither 
fat nor thin, neither tall nor short. Place the tall and 
the short man side' by side and the comic effect is height- 
ened by the double comparison instantly suggested. 
Yet the juxtaposition of a normal man and a child is 
not funny, although the disproportion is as great, be- 
cause between them there is no common standard by 
which we can measure them; each conforms to his own 
norm. But let the child attempt to assume the airs of a 
man, and the result is comic, because in so doing he has 
brought upon himself the application of the man's 
standard, and his departure from that standard is 
seized upon by the comic sense. Thus it appears that 
the essential element in comic perception of this sort is 
a recognized norm, by reference to which the incongru- 
ity is perceived. Falstaff, always alive to the comic in 
himself, perfectly grasps the principle of comic effect 
when he turns in mock fury upon his diminutive page 
with: " I do here walk before thee like a sow that hath 
overwhelmed all her litter but one. If the prince put 



24 The Cojnedian s Material and His Attitude. 

thee into my service 'for any other reason than to set 
me off, why then I have no judgment." ' 

What is true of the physical realm is equally true of 
the spiritual, and the comic treatment of character can 
be reduced to the same principle as the comic use of de- 
formity. It is the defects in men that the comedian 
seizes upon, the places in their spiritual build where 
they are disproportioned, overgrown or undergrown, 
and the treatment of Falstaff's physical deformities 
has the same basis as the treatment of Malvolio's spir- 
itual ones. 

Neither Falstaff nor Malvolio, however, are as far 
toward the character-end of the scale as, for example. 
The Comedy of Errors is toward the incident-end. For 
incident may be presented without character, but char- 
acter may scarcely be presented dramatically save 
through incident, and in most comedy the two things 
are inextricably bound up together: the incidents de- 
pend for their comic quality on the character of the par- 
ticipants in them, the comic aspects of the characters 
are made apparent through the incidents. Yet there 
is this difference between the mutual relations of these 
two elements in Shakespeare and in Jonson: Shakes- 
peare seems to have taken his plots pretty well made 
up, and to have created his characters within their 
lines, thus vivifying and transforming the original 
story; Jonson's plays, on the other hand, give an im- 
pression of being built up in a fashion the very reverse 
of this: it seems — if we may roughly indicate what 
must have been really a very complex process — as if he 
had first selected his characters and then worked out to 
fit them a plot such as would best show off their qual- 
ities. The result is seen in the difference between 
Shakespeare's plots and Jonson's — a difference that will 
be discussed later on. 

Admitting, then, that strictly speaking plot and char- 
acter ought not to be considered apart from one 



1 H.-nry ir. Part 11; Act i, Sc. 2. 



The Comedians Material and His Attitude. 25 

another, we have for convenience, ventured to treat 
them separately, considering first the characters, and 
then the plot as determined by the characters. 

The characteristic of the comic standpoint being its 
regard for incongruities as such, the material for it in 
human nature will be found, as already stated, in the 
imperfections of men's character. A perfectly poised 
character, one absolutely symmetrical, would not be 
comic. It might be involved from without in a comic 
situation, but the comic would be that of external in- 
cident, the character itself would be immune from the 
comedian's touch. But as soon as any defect is seen, 
any lack of proportion, the opportunity is given, the 
material is liable to be seized upon. Nothing can be 
better than Meredith's words regarding this phase of 
the comic spirit: 

"Men's future upon earth does not attract it; their honesty and 
shapeliness in the present does; and whenever they wax out of pro- 
portion overblown, affected, pretentious, bombastical. hypocritical, 
pedantic fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived 
or hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, planning short-sight- 
edly plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with their 
professions, and violate the unwritten but perceptible laws binding 
them in consideration one to another; whenever they offend sound 
reason fair justice; are false in humility or mined with conceit, in- 
dividually or in tne bulk-the Spirit overhead will look humanely 
malign and cast an oblique light on them, followed by volleys of 
silvery laughter. That is the Comic Spirit." ' 

The first part of this passage, which has to do with 
the comedian's material, is applicable to all comic writ- 
ino- from Aristophanes to Gilbert. But the last phrases, 
which in an exquisite figure seek to express the atti- 
tude of the comedian toward his material, though 
beautifully appropriate when applied, as Meredith 
meant them, to Moliere, cannot be used of other 
comedians. The laughter of Aristophanes is seldom 
"silvery"; the laughter of Shakespeare is sometimes 

1 Meredith: An Essay ctt Comedy, pp. 83, 84. 



26 77/1? Co)nedia7i's Mate7'ial and His Attitude. 

tempered, though not checked, by keenest pity; the 
laughter of Jonson is often not thoroughly "humane." 
It is at this point that comedians diverge, and their 
writings fall into groups; the basic material is the 
same, but the attitude varies. For obviously it is pos- 
sible, while perceiving the comic aspect of human in- 
firmities, to pity these infirmities, or to regard them 
indulgently, or to deride them, or to launch against 
them the bitterest invective, or, finally, to regard them 
without passing judgment at all. According as the 
writer's attitude is or is not, on the whole, one of cen- 
sure, comedies fall into two classes which we may call 
judicial and non-judicial; the judicial is apt to pass 
over into satire, the non-judicial into pathos. The dif- 
ference between the two attitudes may be illustrated by 
the difference between Shakespeare's treatment of 
Malvolio and of Falstaff; it is indicated, too, in the 
shades of difference between the treatment of Falstaff 
in The Merrry Wives of Windsor and in Henry IV. We 
recognize that the Malvolio episodes, and those of The 
Merry Wives are less Shakespearean than those of Henry 
IV, and we may accept Shakespeare as representative 
of the non-judicial type. 

The judicial, the satiric, is the older sort. In Greece 
comedy arose out of satire of the most direct and 
intimate character, and Aristophanes' satire is still 
recklessly personal and deliberately judicial and didac- 
tic. In Menander it became more general, levelling its 
judgments at types instead of at individuals, and it was 
this note that Terence took up for the Roman Comedy. 
That comedy ought explicitly to judge, to teach, to, 
exhort was accepted as a fundamental principle, and 
Sidney was expressing the traditional creed when he 
said: 

"The comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life, 
which he representeth in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that 
may be, so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be 
such a one."' 



1 Sidney: Defense of Poesy, p. 28. 



The Comedian's Material and His Attitude. 27 

The passage exactly illustrates the comic satirist's 
position: "The common errors of our life" describes 
his material; "the most ridiculous and scornful sort 
that may be," covers the treatment; and the last clause, 
"so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content 
to be such a one," states the underlying purpose, as 
comedians have usually asserted it. It exactly applies 
to Jonson; it does not apply at all to Shakespeare's 
mature work, which we must always regret that Sidney 
did not see. 

It is, therefore, not with Shakespeare that Jonson 
must be compared, but with Aristophanes, Menander, 
Terence, among the ancients, and, among the moderns, 
with Moliere and with the English comedy of which 
Congreve is the most brilliant representative. All of 
these are judicial, all are satiric, some of them are in 
spirit far more nearly akin to Juvenal and Swift than to 
Shakespeare, and one feels that the classification which 
throws Jonson with Shakespeare, instead of with 
Juvenal, and puts Tacitus into yet another group, — that 
such a classification has its weak points. 

For with Jonson's and Sidney's point of view it is 
apparent that we are approaching very close to satire, 
and that it depends less on the theory than on the 
temper of the writer and the character of his times, 
whether he will express his thought in satiric dramas 
or satiric histories or satiric epistles. Moreover, no 
division line can be drawn between the comedian with 
satiric color, and the satirist whose comic sense has 
hardened to irony, and the aim here is not to establish 
boundaries but to discover tendencies. 



CHAPTER III. 



Character Treatment in Jonson's Typical Comedy. 

Accepting-, then, Jonson's work as of the judicial type, 
consider in detail his treatment of character. And 
first, it does not do to rest upon his own assertions with 
regard to his writing. For, with the best intentions, 
one seldom tells the exact truth about oneself, and 
though what a man says of himself is always significant 
and worth regarding, it is often to be taken as indirectly 
indicative of his real nature and purpose rather than as 
directly descriptive of them. Jonson, moreover, was 
sometimes singularly infelicitous in speaking of him- 
self, and the mere culling from prologue and epilogue of 
all the lines in which he expresses his dramatic theory 
will not give quite an adequate conception of his actual 
work. Especially is this true of his comedies, where 
his artistic sense sometimes led him to depart as a play- 
wright from some of his theories as a thinker. It was 
not that his utterances were insincere, but that his 
theory was not quite complete enough to cover all of 
his practice. 

This method of collecting his statements and adding 
them together to stand for his art is perhaps respon- 
sible for the assumption generally made that Jonson's 
comedies always enforce a moral lesson. This is simply 
not true, although he himself does with great emphasis 
and entire sincerity assert that the duty of the comedian 
is to punish vice. Thus here: 

" But with an armed and resolved hand, 
I'll strip the ragged follies of the time 
Naked as at their birth .... 

. . . . and with a whip of steel, 
Print wounding lashes in their iron ribs. 



Character Treatment in Jonsons Typical Comedy. 29 

. . . . my strict hand 
Was made to seize on vice, and with a gripe 
Squeeze out the humor of such spongy souls, 
As lick up every idle vanity." ' 

This is well enough for a part of his work. It applies 
to Volpone; it applies also to The Poetaster and to Cynthia's 
Revels, though not in the same sense, for the genuine 
morality of Volpone is as diverse as possible from the 
Pharisaic, egotistic superiority of the last two plays. It 
applies also to Jonson's two tragedies, and to parts of his 
other comedies. On the other hand, the moral of The 
Alchemist or of Bartholotnew Fair would be hard to find. 
For Jonson did indeed teach and scourge, but not always 
did his teaching inculcate morality or his scourging lash 
the scoundrel as such. On the whole, his efforts are 
directed quite as much against intellectual weakness as 
against moral, and he preached quite as emphatically 
from the text " don't be a fool " as from the text "don't be 
a knave," while if we except his tragedies, the weight of 
emphasis is rather on the first than on the second. Run 
rapidly through the important plays with this in view: 

In Every Man in His Humour there are a number of 
rogues and a few honest men, but the line of division is 
drawn, not on a basis of honesty, but on a basis of wit. 
The three witty rogues, Wellbred, Young Knowell, and 
Brainworm, are successful in discomfiting not only the 
other rogues, but also the honest men, and Brainworm 
is at the end pardoned for his offenses because he has 
shown such ability in committing them. Such a play 
can scarcely be called moral, though no one would call 
it immoral either, unless it were some zealot such as 
Zeal-of-the-land Busy. If it teaches anything, it teaches 
that it is convenient to have a quick brain, a ready 
tongue, and an elastic conscience. 

In Every Man out of His Humour the tone is more 
severe, and the author, speaking through Macilente, 

' Induction, Every Man out of His Humour; Works, II, n, i8. 



3© Character Treatme?it in Jonsori s Typical Comedy. 

does indeed lash vice as well as folly. Every person is 
in turn exposed and censured, but the moral tone is 
spoiled by the fact that Macilente himself, through 
whose malignant activity these exposures are brought 
about, is left untouched. He is rather the most disa- 
greeable scoundrel of them all, yet he goes free, and 
leaves the stage at the end licking his chops over the 
discomfiture he nas occasioned. 

In Cynthia's Revels and The Poetaster the pharisaic tone 
already alluded to may be called moral, but it seems 
more truly immoral than the most direct praise of vice 
could be. 

Sejanus and Volponc, which follow, may be taken 
together, though one is called tragedy and one comedy. 
In these the tone, for the first and almost the last time, 
is that of a firm and strenuous morality. Both plays 
show stupendous vice bringing upon itself its own 
ruin — a negative kind of morality, to be sure, but gen- 
uine and consistfent. 

In Epicoene, however, we have pure farce, without a 
trace of moral tone, and all the better for its freedom 
from it, and in The Alchemist we have the very apotheo- 
sis of rogiiery. Three people conspire to cheat the 
world. Their success is complete and they outwit the 
vicious, the hypocritical, the simple; but they also 
bring about the discomfiture of the only honest man in 
the play. When at last they are brought to bay, one of 
the three saves himself by deserting the other two, and 
.purchases his master's forgiveness by making over to 
him their ill-gotten gains. 

Finally, in the coarse but good-natured laughter of 
Bartholomew Fair, even the fools are let off easily, while 
the knaves find the mad, merry rascality of the fair a 
very Elysium. One might go on through the rest of 
the plays, but the great ones end here, and the rest 
would not furnish anything new. 

Jonson's comedy, then, is judicial but not always 
moral, that is, it always subjects its persons to a judg- 



Character Treatment in Jonsons Typical Comedy. 31 

ment according to some standard, but this standard is 
quite as apt to be an intellectual one as a moral one. 
Among those which apply an intellectual standard, The 
Alchemist and Bartholotnew Fair are preeminent; among 
those which apply the moral standard, Volpone stands 
alone among the comedies, but in this as in other respects 
it may be classed with the tragedies Sejanus and Catilifie. 



Thus far we have been considering the general tone 
and purpose of the comedies in their treatment of 
character. The next question is as to the method of 
treatment. Satire, Moulton remarks, may accomplish 
its end in one of two ways; " the one declares a thing 
ridiculous, the other exhibits it in a ridiculous disguise. 
Reducing the two to their lowest terms, in the one you 
call a man a fool, in the other you disguise yourself in 
his likeness and then play the fool " — he illustrates by 
citing the Saturday Review and Punch, " the first alleges 
folly, the latter presents it," ' 

In the case of the dramatist, one would suppose that 
only the second method would be employed. As a mat- 
ter of fact the temptation to "allege " folly as well to 
"present" it is usually too great to be resisted. Even 
Moliere sometimes has a wise Dorine or a Cleante to 
explain or expose the follies of the other characters, 
while Jonson almost always has some such character to 
stand, as it were, with pointer in hand, as demonstrator 
of the action. Once one begins to watch for this fea- 
ture it is really remarkable how constant it is. Some- 
times there is one demonstrator for the entire play, 
sometimes there are several who take turns. Thus, in 
Every Man out of His Humour Macilente is demonstrator 
in chief; for the scenes where he is absent. Carlo Buf- 
fone acts as understudy.'' In Cynthia's Revels^ Crites holds 
the pointer;' in The Poetaster, \\. is Horace; in The Silent 



'Moulton: The Ancient Classical Drama, p. 256. 

2 Cf. infra, pp. 58-60. 

3 IMercury & Cupid are assistant-demonstrators; cf. infra, p. S3. 



32 Character Treatment in Jonson's Typical Comedy. 

Woman, it is any one of the three friends: Truewit, Dau- 
phine, or Clerimont; in Volpone, it is, for the main action, 
Mosca and Volpone themselves, who both egg on their 
victims and comment on their folly, while for the sub- 
interest of Sir Politick Would-be, the demonstrator or 
showman is Peregrine. Even Jonson's tragedy is not 
free from this peculiarity, for in Sejanus the function of 
Arruntius in the play is only as a commenter on the 
other characters. 

Such an expedient seems essentially undramatic. 
When used to excess, as Jonson often used it, it is so. 
To be constantly explaining the nature of the charac- 
ters implies either that the dramatist does not trust the 
cogency of his presentation, or that he does not trust 
the perceptive powers of the audience. The latter 
alternative is in Jonson's case not unlikely, but it is also 
true that, save v/hen he was at his very best, his genius 
was more expository than dramatic; his mind was more 
akin to Bacon's than to Shakespeare's, and it was pos- 
sibly a little easier for him to explain in crisp phrase 
exactly how a man was a fool, than for him to give the man 
free scope to act according to his folly.' Some of the best 
things in his dramas are found in these' non-dramatic 
lapses. In Every Man out of His Humour, for instance, in 
the scene where the scented courtier. Fastidious Brisk, 
meets the court lady, Saviolina, Macilente stands by 
watching, and one of his comments is worth all the rest 
of the scene put together. Fastidious, knowing the 
lady is about to enter, says, "A kind of affectionate rev- 
erence strikes me with a cold shivering, methinks." 
Macilente mutters sardonically: "I like such tempers 
well, as stand before their mistresses with fear and 
trembling; and before their Maker, like impudent moun- 
tains!"' 

When the practise is not carried to excess, however, 
it is not out of place, but is entirely consistent with the 



1 Extreme instances of this are ^z'^ry Man out of His Hitinour and Cynthia's 
Revels. Cf. infra, pp. 57-60; 82, 83. 

* Every Man out 0/ His Humour, Act III, Sc. 3; Works, II, 118. 



Character Treatment i?i Jonsoiis Typical Comedy. n 

spirit of this kind of comedy. For, as will more clearly 
appear in the discussion of plots, the characters in any 
such play may always be divided into two groups, a 
large group of victims, a small group of victimizers or 
intriguers who control event-s and search out ways to 
"gull" the victims. Such being the case, it is quite 
natural that they should at the same time laugh at and 
discuss their folly. Thus in Volpone, the comments of 
Mosca and his master on the stupid greed of the legacy- 
hunters are dramatically proper, whereas those of Per- 
egrine on Sir Politick are doubtful. In Epicoene the 
gleeful asides of the three young men as they work 
up the two fools, Daw and La-Foole, are as legiti- 
mate as are the whispered gibes of Sir Toby, Sir 
Andrew and Maria as they watch Malvolio from their 
ambush. 

In his treatment of character, there are two dangers 
liable to beset the satiric dramatist. His material being 
human infirmitj^ his tone judicial and didactic, his tem- 
per a little superior if not scornful, he is apt to do one 
of two things: — if he is not broad-minded enough and 
impersonal enough he will be too particular, and fall 
into personal invective; if he has not a firm grasp of 
the concrete or artistic he will be too general, and will 
trench upon allegory. 

The tendency toward personalities is easy to compre- 
hend. It characterized the beginnings of comedy, and 
Aristophanes boldly and deliberately gave way to it. 
Menander appears to have broken away from it, — partly 
probably for political reasons, — and the Roman comedy 
is to some extent free from it, but it has always been 
one of the pitfalls of satire. Jonson certainly fell into 
it in two plays, Cynthia s Revels and The Poetaster^ and 
probably in some parts of many of his other plays, and 
though he is vehement in defending himself from the 
charge of personality, his very defences, like his re- 
peated assertions that he was above feeling the abuse 
of his enemies, do not leave upon us quite the impres- 
3 



34 Character Treatment in /onsofis Typical Comedy. 

sion he intended. Yet if this was his besetting sin, he 
knew it for a fault, knew that 

" poet never credit gain'd 
By writing truths, but things, like truths, well feign'd." ' 

And doubtless he was often enough misunderstood and 
wilfully misinterpreted. There were plenty of " small 
fry " about town, ready to " make a libel which he 
meant • a play,'"^ and he has us heartily on his side 
when he scores the " State-decypherer, or politick pick- 
lock of the scene," who is "so solemnly ridiculous as to 
search out, who was meant by the gingerbread-woman, 
who by the hobby-horse man, who by the costard-mon- 
ger, nay, who by their wares. Or that will pretend to 
affirm on his own inspired ignorance, what Mirror of 
Magistrate is meant by the justice, what great lady by 
the pig-woman, what concealed statesman by the seller 
of mouse-traps, and so of the rest."' 

Compare with this an interesting parallel in Moliere: 

" Et voila de quoi j'oui's I'autre jour se plaindre Moliere, parlant a 
des personnes qui le chargeoient de mgme chose que vous. II disoit 
que rien ne lui donnoit du deplaisir comme d'etre accuse de regarder 
quelqu'un dans les portraits qu'il fait; que son dessein est de peindre 
les moeurs sans vouloir toucher aux personnes .... et que si 
quelque-chose etoit capable de le degouter de faire des comedies, 
c'etoit les ressemblances qu'ony vouloit touiours trouver," etc.* 

While, for an agreement which was perhaps even 
deliberately verbal, note Congreve's: 

" Others there are, whose malice we'd prevent: 
Such, who watch plays, with scurrilous intent 
To mark out who by characters are meant: 
And though no perfect likeness they can trace. 
Yet each pretends to know the copied face. 
These, with false glosses, feed their own ill- nature. 
And turn to libel what was meant a satire." * 



1 Prologue, The Silenil JVoinan; Works, III, 332. 

2 lb. Cf . also in the Dedicatory Letter to Vol/ione: " I know that nothing can be so inno- 
cently writ or carried, but may be made obnoxious to construction," etc. Works. Ill, 158. 

3 Induction, Bartholotnew Fair; Works IV, 353. 

'^ Moliere: V Impromptu de Versailles: Oeuvres, III, 413. 
'' Congreve: Epilogue, The Way of the World. 



Character Treatment iu Jonson's Typical Comedy. 35 

The opposite tendency, that towards allegory, is a 
natural result of the comic point of view. For since 
the comedian regards defects, oddities of character, he 
is usually led to the study of temperaments in their ex- 
treme development, and his treatment is necessarily 
bound to emphasize the eccentricities in the tempera- 
ment, leaving the rest of the personality somewhat 
shadowy. Indeed, it was a part of Jonson's theory 
that if eccentricity is anything more than external, it 
will effect the entire personality. To any such case he- 
applies the term "humour," defining the term thus: 

" As when some one peculiar quality- 
Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw 
All his affects, his spirits, and his powers, 
In their confluctions, all to run one wa)', 
This may be truly said to be a humor." ' 

The theory is physchologically perfectly sound, but it, 
as well as Jonson's practice, has met with rather harsh 
treatment at the hands of critics. Thus Hazlitt: 

"His imagination fastens instinctivelj' on someone mark or sign 
by which he designates the individual, and never lets it go, for fear 
of not meeting with any other means to express himself by. A cant 
phrase, an odd gesture, an old-fashioned regimental uniform, a 
wooden leg, a tobacco box, or a hacked sword, are the standing 
topics by which he embodies his characters to the imagination." "•' 

Such a statement simply showed that Hazlitt entirely 
missed the point of Jonson's work. Curiously enough, 
too, his criticism may be answered out of Jonson's own 
mouth, if we simply go on quoting the passage from 
Every Man out of His Humour begun above. The speaker, 
Asper, who represents Jonson, continues — give ear, 
Hazlitt— 

" But that a rook, by wearing a pyed feather, 

The cable hatband, or the three piled ruff, 

A yard of shoe-tye, or the Switzer's knot 

On his French garters, should affect a humor! 

O, it is more than most ridiculous." ^ 

' Induction, Every Man out of His Humour : Works, II, i6. 
^ Hazlitt: English Comic IVriiers, 77. 
■* lb., p. 17. 



36 Character Treatment in Jonsons Typical Comedy. 

In other words, Jonson emphasizes the fact that it is 
inner and spiritual eccentricity with which he has to 
do, not accidents of external appearance. 

Coleridge's censure touches him nearer, because it 
involves a truth, being scarcely more than a burlesque 
restatement of the above lines: 

" Jonson's [characters] are either a man with a huge wen, having a 
circulation of its own, and which we might conceive amputated, and 
the patient thereby losing all his character; or they are mere wens 
themselves instead of men — wens personified, or with eyes, nose, and 
mouth cut out, mandrake fashion." ' 

Under the fantastic figure, Coleridge does here touch 
upon a real danger which besets all such writing 
— the danger of emphasizing a single odd trait to such 
an extent that the individual is lost sight of, or — which 
amounts to nearly the same thing — choosing as a sub- 
ject for treatment some odd trait which is of so narrow 
a reach that it does not mold the rest of the character, 
but rather obscures it, and has the force of monomania, 
or " obsession." This is in fact a fault which Jonson's 
inferior work shows. Thus, the plot of The Silent Woman 
is based on a single characteristic of Morose, his hatred 
of noise. The play is, however, pure farce throughout, 
and as such the character of Morose is legitimate 
enough. If the play needed defense, however, the argu- 
ment Gifford has chosen, if it were true, is the right 
one. He says: 

" Both Upton and Whalley have mistaken the character of Morose, 
they suppose it to be a dislike of noise; whereas this is an accidental 
quality altogether dependent upon the master-passion, or ' humour,' 
a most inveterate and odious self-love."'^ 

Even an admirer of Jonson may not quite agree with 
Gifford in this instance, but it is usually true that of 
Jonson's mature work Coleridge's criticism does not 
hold. In his three greatest plays, The Alchemist, Volpofie, 



1 Coleridge: Literary Remains, II, 279. 

2 GiSord's note. The Silent li^'oman. Ill, 399. 



Character Treatment in Jonsons Typical Comedy. 37 

and Bartholomew Fair, he never passes the bounds of the 
dramatic. Bartholome^v Fair is the most concretely real- 
istic piece of portraiture he ever did, Volpone deals more 
with generalized types, while The Alchemist stands 
between the two, but all keep within artistic limits. 

In his less great work, however, the tendency to per- 
sonification of single qualities is very clear. In The 
Magnetic Lady, for example, Lady Loadstone's powers of 
attraction are continually alluded to, though with no 
apparent reason unless it be perhaps the sound of her 
name, and at the end she is married to Captain Ironside, 
presumably because magnet attracts iron. In The Staple 
of N'ews the symbolism is more than verbal, but is puz- 
zlingly capricious. Pecunia is apparently an ordinary 
young lady, but occasionally she is made to stand for 
money or wealth taken allegorically, and though young 
Pennyboy assures us that "she kisses like a mortal 
creature " the reader is never quite clear in his mind as 
to whether she is a girl or a money-bag.' 

These are extreme cases, but it would be possible to 
choose out characters from the plays so as to make a 
series illustrating steps in the process all the way from 
vivid artistic portraiture like that of the Puritan zealot 
in Bartholomew Fair to personification like that of Lady 
Pecunia, with her attendant maids, Mortgage, Statute, 
Band and Wax, and her gentleman-usher, Broker. 
Finally, it is interesting to note that the lapses into 
personification occur more frequently in his late plays, 
as his powers waned, while his over-personal invective 
appears to have come early, before he was inclined to 
control his resentments. 



Another objection, most comprehensive of all, is made 
to comedy of the class to which Jonson's belongs. It 
is of Moliere's plays, but it might as well be of Jonson's, 
that Frevtaof savs: 



1 Cl. infra, pp. 90-92. 



v 



38 Character Treatment in Jonson's Typical Comedy. 

" The highest dramatic life is lacking to them — the processes of 
coming into being, the growth of character. We prefer to recognize 
on the stage how one becornes a miser, rather than how he ts one." • 

But this an indictment, not of Moliere's or Jonson's 
comedy, but of all comedy. What we must look for in 
Jonson's comedies, as in Moliere's, is a study not of 
character development but of characters which are 
already formed, or which are treated as if they were 
already formed. For, " how a man becomes a miser " is 
not a comic but a tragic spectacle. The essentially 
tragic in Browning's A Soul's Tragedy is the spectacle 
of Chiappino's degeneration; but a comedian might take 
up Chiappino where Browning left him, and make him 
the hero of a comedy like Tartiiffe. He could not take 
the period of his' life that Browning takes — the period 
of his "becoming" and treat it deeply or truly, without 
making it tragic' Again, the history of Lydgate in 
Middlemarch, is, as it stands, a "soul's tragedy"; but the 
final Lydgate, the conventional, prosperous physician, 
specialist in gout, would furnish good material for the 
satiro-comic artist. And Tartuffe himself — would it 
have been comic to watch how he became Tartuffe ? It is 
indeed true, as Hegel suggests, that to preserve the 
comic in a comedy we must drop the curtain in time. 
But it is perhaps equally true that we must, at its begin- 
ing, not raise the curtain too soon. 

Of Jonson's five great plays the earliest has been 
called, perhaps rightly, his most perfect.' Bartholotnew 
Fair is certainly the most recklessly, riotously funny, 
while The Alchemist and Volpone contend for the position 
of the greatest. The Alchemist, is, indeed, structurally 
the most marvelous of plays, but there are some readers 
at least with whom no comedy leaves the impression 
that Volpone does, — an impression comparable in inten- 



* Freytag: Technique of the Dravia, pp. 250, 251. 

*Cf. Supra, pp. 17, 18. Note, however, that the process of reasoning does not imply 
any assertion that ihe converse is true: namely, that tragedy ;«?<,?/ involve character devel- 
opment. Few great tragedies have such a basis. 

3 Swinburne: A Study 0/ Ben Jonson, pp. 3, 14. 



Character Treatment in Jonson's Typical Comedy. 39 

sity with that made by a tragedy, though the effect here 
is mainly intellectual rather than emotional. It is the 
effect of the double character, Volpone-Mosca, which 
impresses us with a kind of hugeness, a diabolical fer- 
tility of power almost too great for comedy, and one 
cannot help wishing that Jonson had honored these two 
with opponents as worthy of their genius as those Shake- 
speare gave lago. 

Finally, to say that Jonson does not appeal to the 
imagination' is to forget Volpone, and Sir Epicure 
Mammon. What is true, is, that he appeals wholly to 
the intellect. Any one who expects to be emotionally 
touched will be disappointed, but if one is satisfied with 
the stimulus that comes of contact with a master mind, 
he will not seek in vain. Indeed one sometimes feels 
that, in coming from the sunny hedonism of some 
among the Elizabethans, there is a kind of pleasure, 
bracing while it chills, in getting into touch with this 
man, who stands apart from the rest, among them and 
not of them, whose "light" had not their "sweetness" 
and whose savage judgments never grew thoroughly 
humane, yet who had the nobleness that comes of power 
and sincerity and seriousness. 



1 Aronstein: Ben Jonson' s Theorie des Lustspieh: AngUa, XVII, 477. 



CHAPTER IV. 

Structural Features of Jonson's Typical Comedy. 

I. General Structure of the Satiro-comic Plot. 

It was suggested in the preceding chapter that the re- 
lation of plot to character in Jonson's writing was the 
converse of what it was in Shakespeare's — that Jonson 
made his plots to fit his characters, while Shakespeare 
made his characters to fit his plots. A comparison of 
Shakespeare's plays with their sources in history or 
romance shows that he was at little trouble to alter his 
stories, and that the whole force of his genius went 
into a recreating of the persons in the story. The 
stories he chooses for his typical comedies are, more- 
over, serious love stories, and to this main interest the 
comic element is subordinated. 

This comic element is introduced in two ways: through 
comic episodes interspersed between the serious scenes, 
and loosely connected with the main plot, and through 
a delicately comic treatment of the serious scenes them- 
selves. 

The first method is old — it goes back to the miracle 
plays; the second — the habit, namely, of treating a sub- 
ject seriously and yet casting upon it a comic light — 
while it is found in other writers, has come to seem 
peculiarly Shakespearean, and it is one of the things 
that give to his three greatest comedies. Much Ado About 
Nothing^ As You Like It, and Twelfth Night, their unique 
charm. The double point of view is embodied in his 
two most complex women characters, Rosalind and 
Beatrice, as its elements are singly projected, in A Mid- 
summer Nighfs Dream, in the two beings, Oberon and 
Puck, Oberon taking the lover's mishaps seriously, Puck 
delighting in the comic aspect of them. 



Structural Features of Jonson's Satiric Comedy. 41 

Turning now to Jonson's typical comedies, we find 
something quite diflferent. He starts with his group of 
characters whose comic aspects he wished to bring out. 
To this end he invents situations for them, and by com- 
bining these situations he gets a plot for the comedy- 
Thus, whereas in Shakespeare the serious interest de- 
termines the main plot and the comic interest is rele- 
gated to episodes or embodied in the treatment of the 
serious scenes, in Jonson the comic interest deter- 
mines the main plot and the serious interest, where 
present, is subordinate. In Shakespeare the comic 
purpose influences the tone, the coloring, the atmos- 
phere; in Jonson it not only does this but it actually 
prescribes the form, the underlying structure. 

Naturally there results a complete divergence in the 
structural features of the two kinds of comedies. 
Shakespeare's plots have some resemblance to those of 
some tragedies, the difference being that, besides the 
happy ending, the incidents are more external, based 
rather on chance incident than on spiritual necessity. 
But even this distinction is in Shakespeare not always 
preserved. Compare, for example, the plots of Rotneo 
and Juliet and The Two Getitlemeii of Verona, which last we 
choose because of its simplicity. The story of Romeo 
and Juliet is as follows: 

Two houses are involved in a deadly feud. Romeo, prince of one 
house, falls in love with Juliet, daughter of the opposing house. 
Juliet returns his love, but cannot free herself from parental 
tyranny, which is about to force her into a distasteful marriage. 
Romeo, because of an accidental street brawl, is banished. Juliet 
takes a sleeping potion which enables her to simulate death, and she 
is placed for dead in the family tomb. She has sent word to Romeo 
to come to the tomb and carry her away, but Romeo has missed her 
message and heanng only of the news of her death he returns to 
visit the tomb. He kills himself there, and she rouses from her 
lethargy to find his dead body beside her, whereupon she kills her- 
self. 

It will be seen that the story turns upon a series of ac- 
cidents, and that it might as well have happened other- 
wise. Take now The Tivo Gentlemen. 



42 Structural Features of Jonsons Satiric Comedy. 

Proteus is in love with Julia, a lady of Verona, and is loved by 
her, but his father sends him to Milan, and their intercourse is thus 
broken. At Milan he finds his friend Valentine wooing Silvia, 
daughter of the Duke. She returns his love, but her father opposes 
the marriage and favors another suitor. Proteus too falls in love with 
Silvia, and betrays to the Duke Valentine's plan to elope with his 
daughter. Valentine is thereupon banished, and Silvia yet more 
tyrannously urged on to the marriage with the favored suitor. Pro- 
teus takes advantage of the Duke's favor to press his own suit to 
Silvia, but his advances are met with reproachful contempt. Mean- 
while Julia comes to Milan disguised as a page, to seek her lover. 
She enters his service and discovers his treachery. Silvia finally 
runs away to seek Valentine, and the Duke and Proteus, with Julia, 
pursue her. Proteus gets Silvia in his power but she is rescued by 
Valentine. He repents his treachery and renews allegiance to 
Julia, while Valentine is permitted to marry Silvia. 

The resemblance of the Valentine-Silvia plot to the 
Romeo-Juliet one is manifest. It is equally manifest 
that there is no more reason why this plot should have 
made a comedy than why the other should have made a 
tragedy. A few changes toward the end would have 
made all the difference. In the treatment, however, 
there is no mistaking the difference of tone. The man- 
ner in the tragedy is consistently serious, there is no 
trace of the double attitude — the serious and the mock- 
ing — and the play is given an air of tragic necessity not 
inherent in the material. But structurally the two plays 
are of the same type: both show the growth of the 
bond between the lovers, then its severence through 
outside interference, then their separation, then their 
plan to be reunited. In the one case the plan, through 
a series of accidents, is successful; in the other, through 
a series of accidents, it fails. 

Turn now to Jonson's plots. At first glance they 
seem too hopelessly complex for analysis, but, as will 
appear, their principle is single, and their underlying 
structure comparatively simple. 

In discussing character it was remarked that Jon- 
son's drainatis personcR could always be divided into 
two groups, a large group of victims and a small group 



Structural Features of Jonsons Satiric Comedy. 43 

of victimizers. It was also noted that Jonson shared 
the traditional view of comedy, i. e. that it should be 
such a " scornful " presentation of folly or vice as might 
deter men from falling into like errors. In his plays, 
accordingly, the victim-group presents to us the follies 
or vices chosen for treatment, the victimizer-group is 
entrusted with the duty of exploiting the owners of 
these follies and vices and bringing them to their nat- 
ural end in exposure or ruin. The resulting plot may 
be briefly described as a network of practical jokes, 
some perfectly harmless, some more serious in their 
issues. There is no rise and fall of the movement, no 
action and reaction, such as we find in the serious 
drama and in the romantic comedy plots, there is simply 
the development of a trick or series of tricks, in which 
one set of participants are more or less helplessly pas- 
sive, and the other set is mischievously or malignantly 
active. 

Thus the Shakespeare type of comedy and the Jonson 
type are about as near two extremes as can be imag- 
ined. A middle form may be found, however, in the 
plays of Terence. These resemble Jonson's in the 
prominence given to trickery, but are like Shakespeare's 
in the fact that the tricks are for the most part not 
planned simply for trickery's sake, there is a serious 
purpose underlying all, which motives the action. 
Usually this is a love motive: e. g. a young man is in 
love with a slave-girl and wants to buy her freedom. 
He has no money and his father will not give him any. 
He therefore resorts to craft, and with the help of his 
servant succeeds in cozening the old man out of a large 
sum. Possibly it then transpires that the slave-girl is 
really the long lost daughter of a wealthy Athenian, and 
the young man is free to make so desirable an alliance. 
The wedding then occurs, all the trickery is forgiven 
and the young man's faithful if rascally servant receives 
his freedom. 

This is not an exact summary of any single play, but 
may serve as a generalized type. It will be evident that 



44 Structural Features of Jonsons Satiric Comedy. 

such a plot contains the elements of both the kinds of 
comedy we have been discussing. ' Imagine the serious 
motive to be given great prominence while the comic 
trickery is made subordinate, and the resulting propor- 
tions might be those of the Romantic comedy. Indeed, 
the argument of some of Terence's plays as they stand 
might pass very well among these comedies; it is only 
in the treatment that the difference is brought out. 
Imagine, on the other hand, the serious motive in part 
or altogether suppressed, and the comic intrigue empha- 
sized; the result will be comedy of Jonson's type. It is 
interesting to note that in Italy the drama seems 
actually to have passed through such modifications, the 
old Roman comedy developing on the one hand into 
Romantic love-drama, and on the other into the drama 
of comic intrigue.' 

An English play which nearly preserves the Teren- 
tian proportions is Massinger's A New Way to Fay Old 
Debts. It is evidently derived from Middleton's A Trick 
To Catch the Old One, but the plot is greatly simplified, 
thus making the play a perfect example for illustration 
of this kind of comedy in English. The argument is as 
follows: 

Wellborn, having wasted his possessions in prodigal living, casts 
about him for a way to recover himself. His estates have been for- 
feited to a rich and unscrupulous uncle, Sir Giles Overreach. Well- 
born turns for help to Lady Allworth, a rich widow to whose hus- 
band he had once done a service, and out of gratitude she agrees to 
pretend that she is betrothed to him. The news spreads, Wellborn's 
credit is restored, and Sir Giles hastens to press money upon him in 
order to further the match, hoping through his nephew's prodigality 
to get possession of Lady A.'s wealth as he had already done of Well- 
born's. Wellborn uses his uncle's money to pay off all his creditors. 

Sir Giles has a daughter, Margaret, whom he wishes to marry to a 
lord. He makes overtures to Lord Lovell, who is not anxious for 
such an alliance, but pretends to favor it, and takes advantage of his 
relations thus established to plan the elopement of Margaret with 
young Allworth, who is in love with her. 

When both the plots are ripe, the disclosures are made. Sir Giles 
discovers that he has lost his daughter, squandered his money on 



' Cf . Vernon Lee : Sttidies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy. 



Structural Features of Jonsons Satiric Comedy. 45 

false representations, and, to crown all, that the bond by which he 
held Wellborn's estates is not valid. Under the combined force of 
these blows, Sir Giles goes mad. 

Here is practical joking- carried to an extreme, but 
the harshness of the conclusion ought not to be taken 
too seriously, save as an indication of the state of the 
comic sense in Massinger's time. Madness appears to 
have been considered comic/ and even if this had not 
been so, a case like this is only an extreme outcome of 
the theory which accepts as comic the victimizing of 
one person by another. In this play, indeed. Sir Giles 
is portrayed as an arrant rascal, and his punishment 
represented as deserved, but it is hard for the reader to 
see wherein his nephew was much better. But the come- 
dian does not always feel bound so to justify his vic- 
tim's fate, and we have already seen that the " moral " 
Jonson with entire serenity let his honest men be out- 
witted and abused. 

The play is typical because with two underlying seri- 
ous motives it places the emphasis on the intrigue of 
one set of persons to outwit another. In this case there 
are a number of conspirators all uniting to trick one 
victim, whereas in Jonson the victims are usually many, 
the conspirators few. But the plan of movement is the 
same; the schemes are carried steadily forward, the 
victim offers no opposition worthy the name, the play 
has no central climax, but pushes forward evenly to the 
last act, which serves merely to disclose what has been 
previously accomplished. 

Turning now to Jonson's plots, we shall find that, 
compared with those of Terence, or with this play of 
Massinger, the emphasis is less on the serious motive, 
and greater on the schemes for trickery. We shall find, 
too, much greater complexity, and often no single line 
of action as clearly dominant as is that of the Wellborn- 
Allworth plot in Massinger's play. 



1 Of. John Corbin: The Elizabethan Hamlet. 



46 Structural Features of Jonsofis Satiric Comedy. 



In considering Jonson's plots it has seemed best to 
subject a few to careful analysis, and give others a brief 
treatment. Those selected, as best showing the varie- 
ties of comic structure, are Every Man in His Humour, 
Every Man out of His Humour, The Alchemist, and 
Volpo7ie. 

2. Structural Features of Every Man in His Hutnour. 

The grouping of the dra/natis personae into intriguers 
and victims has been alluded to. In this play the prin- 
cipal characters fall into the following groups: 



Intriguers. ^ 



Young Kiiowell. 

Brainworm, his servant. 

Wellbred, his friend. 

Bridget, Wellbred's sister-in-law, sister of 

Kitely. She is rather passively in 

league with the intriguers. 



Victims who f A'^^^^a/i?//, father of young Knowell. 



are i n t i - I 
m at e 1 y ! 
connected 
with the 
main plot. 



V i c t i m s 
whose im- 
port an ce < 

"'^^is chiefly 
"episodic. 



Kitely, a merchant; his " humour " is 

jealousy. 
Dajne Kitely, his wife, sister of Wellbred, 
Downright, half-brother of Wellbred; his 
"humour " is rashness and violence. 

Bobadill, a captain; his "humour" is 
boastfulness. 

Master Stephen, consxri of young Knowell; 
his "humour" is general foolishness 
and a desire to ape fine airs and dash- 
ing manners. 

Master Mathew, friend of Bobadill and 
follower of Bridget ; he composes 
verses. 

Formal, Clerk of Justice Clement. 

Jtistice Clement presides over the final clear- 
ing up of misunderstandings. 



Structural Features of Jonson's Satiric Comedy. 49 

the affairs of the prince, and draws down upon himself 
a punishment which indirectly involves his daughter as 
well and thus reacts on the prince. Thus, Polonius 
must be considered as one of the important characters 
in Hamlet, whereas Osric, for example is an episodic 
humor-study. 

In Every Man in His Hmnoiir there is not so marked a 
central interest by which to test the values of the per- 
sons, and it is much more difficult to draw boundary 
lines. One might almost say that all the persons of the 
drama are episodic. There are, however, differences. 
Kitely is in rather close relations with the other char- 
acters, and his "humour " of jealousy is worked upon by 
the two young men when, for the furtherance of their 
schemes, they want to get him conveniently out of the 
way. Dame Kitely is important as a necessary corol- 
lary to Kitely, and Downright falls naturally with this 
group, though he might be cut out of the play without 
making many changes. That Bobadill is episodic will 
be easily seen if we contrast him with Pyrgopolinices, 
in Plautus' Miles Gloriosus. Both are braggart captains, 
but in the Roman play the character is made the centre 
of the dramatic situation. His characteristics are in 
part the cause of the early complication, and they are 
made the key to the final resolution. Bobadill's portrait 
is as clearly drawn as that of Pyrgopolinices, but the 
only thing he does besides talk is once to beat a water- 
carrier, and once to insult a better man than himself 
and get a beating in his turn.' 

Master Stephen and Master Mathew are evidently in 
the play as comic filling. They are of the same breed 
as Master Clove and Master Orange in Every Man out of 
His Humour, and the author's comment on these last may 
be illuminating in this connection. They are two fool- 
ish youths who appear in but one scene, a scene laid in 



1 Did Aristotle have some such case in mind when he said that tragedy ought to imi- 
tate not men but action and life, and that the end of life was a mode of action not a qual- 
ity ? Of. Poetics, VI. 

4 



50 Stj-uctural Features of Jonson's Satiric Comedy. 

the middle aisle of St. Paul's, formerly the assembling- 
place for a motley crew of rogues and oddities. Jonson 
has, moreover, furnished his play with two spectators, 
Mitis and Cordatus, who watch its action, and speak for 
the author in explaining and defending it. As Clove 
and Orange enter, Mitis asks his companion: " What be 
these two, signior?" Cordatus responds: "Marry, a 
couple, sir, that are mere strangers to the whole scope 
of our play; only come to walk a turn or two in this 
scene of Paul's by chance." ' Clove and Orange are an 
extreme case, but extreme cases are apt to be highly 
instructive, and this one illustrates the tendency of such 
comic treatment. Stephen and Mathew appear in more 
scenes than do Clove and Orange, but of them also we 
may say that " they have come to walk a turn or two 
. . . . by chance," and the difference between them 
and the other couple is quantitative rather than quali- 
tative. 

The subjoined analysis of the play is in one respect 
not so convincing as it ought to be, because while it 
indicates the presence of episodic humor-study in the 
scenes, it does not show the proportional bulk of it. No 
analysis can show this, for it is impossible to count the 
lines in a scene and say, so many lines are devoted to 
this, so many to that; for Jonson was too great a writer 
to divide his work into blocks thus, and all any diagram 
can do is to suggest but not fix proportions. But a 
single reading of the play, or of one act, will suffice to 
supply the necessary correction of the diagrammatic 
representation. As a rough indication, however, of pro- 
portional bulk, it is certainly a fair estimate of, for 
example, the third act, to place the amount devoted to 
pure humor-study at seven-eighths of the entire act. In 
the following analysis, those parts of each scene which 
are devoted to episodic humor-study are set off by 
brackets.' 



' Every Man out of His Humour, Act III, Sc. 1; Works, II, 89. 

2 In the diagram no parts of the play have been counted as episodic humor-study 
except such as cannot by any stretch be construed as assisting the main action. 



Structural Features of Jonsoii s Satiric Comedy. 5 1 

Act I. 

Sc. I. Street before Knowell's House. 

The mistaken delivery of young Knowell's letter 
initiates the plot, 
j Master Stephen talks with Knowell and with the 
( messenger. 
Sc. 2. Room in Knowell's House. 

Young Knowell finally gets the letter, hears that 
his father has seen it, and sets out for town. 
\ Master Stephen talks to him and Brainworm. 
Sc. 3. Lane before Cob's House. 

\ Conversation between Master Mathew and Cob. 
Sc. 4. Room in Cob's House, 
j Bobadill and Mathew discuss fencing and verse- 
\ making. 

Act II. 

Sc. I. Hall in Kitely's House. 

Kitely complains to Downright of Wellbred's wild 

ways. 
Mathew and Bobadill enter. Bobadill insults 

Downright. 
Kitely begins to show his " humour " of jealousy, 
Sc. 2. Moorfields. 
j Brainworm, disguised as a soldier, "gulls " Master 
I Stephen in selling him a rapier. 
Sc. 3. Another part of Moorfields. 
j Knowell, on his way to town to overtake his son, 
( discourses on the bringing up of youth. He 
meets Brainworm in his soldier's disguise, and 
takes him into service. 

Act III. 
Sc. I. Room in the Windmill Tavern. 

{ Young Knowell, with Stephen, meets Wellbred, 
\ with Mathew and Bobadill. Elaborate humor- 
' study. 
Brainworm joins them and discloses his trick upon 
Knowell. 



52 Structural Features of Jonson's Satiric Comedy. 

Sc, 2. Kitely's warehouse. 

Kitely and Cash converse. Elaborate develop- 
ment of Kitely's "humour" of jealousy. 
["Conversation between Cob and Cash. 
J Wellbred and Young Knowell, with their three 
j victims, converse. 
I Cob is beaten by Bobadill. 
Sc. 3. Room in Justice Clement's House. 

Kitely hears that his house is full of visitors. His 

jealousy aroused, he rushes home. 
Cob gets a warrant to arrest Bobadill for assault. 

Act IV. 

Sc. 1. Room in Kitely's House. 

f Wellbred and young Knowell show off their vic- 
1 tims for the benefit of the two ladies, Dame 
j Kitely and Bridget. 
I Downright enters, fights with Wellbred. 
Kitely enters and drives the young men out. 
(During the scene young Knowell is supposed to 
fall in love with Bridget, but the only indication 
of this is his own statement in a later scene.) 
Sc. 2, Before Cob's House. 

\ Comic conversation between Cob and Tib. 
Sc. 3. Room in Windmill Tavern. 

Young Knowell confesses to Wellbred his love for 
Bridget. Wellbred promises to compass the 
marriage. 
Sc. 4. The Old Jewry. 

Brainworm sends Knowell to Cob's House on a 
fruitless chase to find his son. 
j Brainworm goes off with Formal, planning to 
I cozen him. 
Sc. 5. Moorfields. 

f Young Knowell with the three victims, Bobadill 
boasts his prowess in sword-play. Downright 
enters and beats him. Downright drops his 
[ cloak, which Stephen appropriates. 



Structural Features of Jotiscns Satiric Comedy. 53 

Sc. 6. Room in Kitely's House. 
\ Kitely's jealousy is portrayed. 
Wellbred sends Brainworm to tell Young Knowell 

to meet him and Bridget at the Tower. 
Wellbred sends Dame Kitely on a false errand to 

Cob's House. He does the same to Kitely. 
He goes off with Bridget to meet Young Knowell. 
Sc. 7. A street. 

f Mathew and Bobadill meet Brainworm (disguised 
J as Formal) and ask him to arrest Downright for 
1 assault. He agrees, but forces them to pay him 
(^ well for the service. 
Sc. 8. Lane before Cob's House. 

Knowell, Dame Kitely and Kitely encounter one 
another. Mutual recriminations ensue, in which 
Cob and Tib are involved. They agree to refer 
the matter to Justice Clement. 

Sc. 9. A street. 

Brainworm, in another disguise, arrests Down- 
right for assault, and arrests Stephen for steal- 
ing Downright's cloak. 

Act V. 

Sc. I. Hall in Justice Clement's House. 

Complete resolution of all misunderstandings. 
Brainworm is pardoned for his offenses because 
of their wit. 



A few general comments on the play are in place 
here. With regard to the "unities," it will be noted 
that the action takes place in a single day, and is con- 
fined to the city of London and its environs, though 
within these limits the place is shifted with a kaleido- 
scopic vivacity that would have dazed Plautus or Ter- 
ence. Unity of action can scarcely be said to exist: 
the play's only claim to unity must be based on its pre- 



54 Structural Features of Jonsoti's Satiric Comedy. 

servation of a uniform tone in the comic element, and 
its centralization of the various comic episodes in the 
small group of arch-conspirators who direct the entire 
action. Like all comedy of this type, the play can not 
properly be said to have any central climax or turning- 
point, any opposing force, any so-called "return-action." 
It consists so far as its plot is concerned, of a series of 
complications intentionally brought about by a few of 
the persons, and a final and comprehensive resolution 
brought about partly by intention and partly by chance. 
The play is, moreover, like Massinger's A New Way to 
Fay Old Debts, Middleton's A Trick to Catch the Old One, 
and others of this class in that this resolution is the 
sole business of the fifth act; up to the very end of the 
fourth act the complications and perplexities continue 
to increase. 

It is noteworthy, moreover, that though Young 
Knowell's love for Bridget is a main motive in the latter 
part of the action, no space is given to the exposition of 
this motive. He must be supposed to fall in love with 
her during the first scene of Act IV, but there is not a 
line in the scene to show this. We are informed of it in 
scene 3 of the same act in the following lines: 

Wellbred. But, tell me ingenuously, dost thou affect my sister 

Bridget as thou pretend'st ? 
Young Knoiuell. Friend, am I worth belief ? 
Wellbred. Come, do not protest. 

Thereupon they discuss ways and means of compassing 
the marriage. Wellbred and Bridget are not again on 
the stage together until they appear in the general 
assembling at Justice Clement's. This illustrates per- 
fectly the difference between Jonson's methods and 
those of other comedians. If Terence had handled the 
same story, his treatment would have emphasized the 
love-motive in little scenes scattered through the play; 
if Shakespeare had been the author, he would have 
raised the love-motive to the dignity of a genuine main- 



Structural Features of Jonsons Satiric Comedy. 55 

plot, and without eliminating the comic incidents would 
have made them distinctly subordinate. Compare, with 
this point in view, the treatment of Dame Pliant in The 
Alchemist,^ and, for contrast, that of Celia in Volpone.'' 



3. Structural Features of Every Man out of His Humour. 

By its very title, the play confessedly aims, first to 
portray each person's eccentricit}'-, and then to bring the 
person to discomfiture. The two agents in bringing this 
about are Carlo Buffone, described as " a public, scur- 
rilous and prophane jester," and Macilente whose 
"humour" is envy. 

The argument of the play is so disconnected that it 
can hardly be given as a single story. Each person has 
separate adventures, and the chief ground of unity is 
that they all know each other. The argument can there- 
fore most conveniently be given under the heads of the 
different persons. 

Funtarvolo, is an eccentric knight of Quixotic man- 
ners. He plans to journey to Constantinople, and 
puts up money on his safe return with his wife, cat 
and dog. If he fails, the person who has accepted 
his money keeps it; if he succeeds the person 
returns him five for one. First, his wife refuses to 
go, then Macilente poisons the dog. His plans are 
thus quashed. 

Fastidious Brisk, is an affected, vain courtier, who dons a 
a new suit every few hours. He boasts of the 
favors he receives of great court ladies, especially 
Saviolina. Macilente first looks on while Saviolina 
snubs him, and then persuades Deliro to imprison 
him for debt. 



' Cf. infra, pp. 60-4. 
2 Cf. infra, pp. 68-71. 



56 Structural Features 0/ /onso?i's Satiric Comedy. 

Fungoso, is a law-student, only desirous of aping Brisk 
in his manners and his clothes. He is, however, 
always "a suit behind," and finally sees the folly of 
his ways. 

Deliro, a citizen, foolishly indulgent to his wife. Through 
Macilente's agency he discovers her faithlessness 
and is cured of his infatuation. 

Fallace, his wife, is thoroughly spoiled by his attentions. 
She is secretly in love with Brisk, and goes to help 
him in prison, but on being discovered there by her 
husband she is mortified into meekness. 

Sordido, a wealthy and covetous farmer, melancholy at 
others' prosperity, hangs himself. Some peasants 
cut him down in time, then, seeing who he is, bewail 
their act. At this Sordido realizes his own evil 
character and repents. 

Sogliardo, his brother, a clownish countryman, anxious 
to buy the name and manners of a gentleman. He 
engages Shift, a worthless impostor, to teach him 
to " take tobacco." He greatly admires Shift, but 
finally discovers that he has been duped. 

Shift, "a thread-bare shark." He boasts of his brav^ery, 
but is forced by Puntarvolo to confess that he is a 
coward. 

Saviolina, a court lady, vain of her penetration. Brisk 
and others introduce her to Sogliardo, telling her 
that he is a gentleman who amuses himself by pre- 
tending to play the clown. She vows she can detect 
the gentleman beneath the acting, and when she 
has committed herself, they discover to her her 
mistake. 

Clove and \ two foolish "coxcombs," "twins of foppery," 
Orange, \ having no part in the action. 

Miiis and ) 
r J f r are spectators of the play. 

Macilente, is the person through whom all the mishaps to 
the others occur, except the adventure of Sordido. 



Structural Features of Jonson's Satiric Comedy. 57 

His chief assistant is Carlo Btiffone, who through- 
out the play joins him in ridiculing the rest. 
Finally Macilente eggs him on to taunt Puntarvolo 
about the loss of his dog, and at the same time urges 
Piintarvolo to resent these insults, until finally the 
knight, roused to fury, seals up Carlo's mouth with 
wax. 

Macilente's malice, having nothing further to feed 
on, becomes quiet. 



The play is a remarkable illustration of the extent to 
which the dramatic purpose may influence the dramatic 
structure. As a play it is poor, but as an extreme in- 
stance of a tendency it is one of the most interesting of 
Jonson's productions. For Jonson's plots have such a 
bewildering surface complexity that it is hard to realize 
how simple is their underlying plan, but once the plan 
is perceived the complexity ceases to bewilder. Of this 
plan the play in question is an absolutely diagrammatic 
instance. The writer has started with his set of eccen- 
tric people, he has planned for each one a little plot that 
will first show him off and then break up his character- 
istic habit of mind. He then merely shuffles the per- 
sons a little, so that the treatment of any one of them 
shall not fall all in one place, and the plan is complete. 
That this is not an exaggerated statement will appear 
from the following summary of scenes. The summary 
is also made to illustrate what has already been said as 
to Jonson's habit of supplying his action with running 
commentary from the lips of some one or more of the 
persons in the scene. In the analysis below, the names 
in the margin beside each scene indicate the persons to 
whom this function of critic and expounder is en- 
trusted," while the names in italics indicate the persons 
whose "humours" form the basis of the action. 



' On this point, cf. the remarks on Cynthia s Revels, infra, pp. S2-3. 



58 Structural Features of Jonson's Satiric Comedy. 



Macilente 
Carlo. 



and 



Chiefly Carlo. 



Macilente. 



Mitis and Cor- 
dattis. 

Carlo and Mac- 
ilente. 



Mitis and Cor- 
datus. 



Macilente. 



Act I. 

Sc. I. J/a^//(?«/^ betrays his ^'humour" 
of envy. 

Sogliardo, encouraged by Carlo, ex- 
presses his intention of becoming 
a gentleman. 

Sordido, plans to hoard his grain till 
time of famine, to sell high. 

Act II. 

Sc. I. Fastidious Brisk and Sogliardo 
exhibit their characteristic "hu- 
mours." 

Puntarvolo exhibits his eccentric- 
ities of manner, and proposes his 
plan for travel. 

Fungoso admires Brisk's suit and 
plans to copy it. 
Sc. 2. Deliro and Fallace are por- 
trayed, Deliro anxiously atten- 
tive, Fallace indifferent or queru- 
lous. 

Fungoso appears in a suit copied 
from Brisk's. 

Act III. 

Sc, I. Clove and Orange converse. 
Brisk, Deliro, Puntarvolo, Carlo, Sog- 
liardo, and Macilente, indulge in 
characteristic conversation. Fun- 
^^i-<? brings a tailor to copy Brisk's 
new suit. Shift is engaged to in- 
struct Sogliardo in taking tobacco. 

Sc. 2. Sordido hangs himself, is cut 
down, and is seized with remorse. 

Sc. 3. Brisk visits Saviolina at court. 
He is snubbed, and Macilente 
witnesses his discomfiture. 



Structural Features of Jonson's Satiric Comedy. 59 



Carlo, Puntar- 
volo, and Mac- 
ilente. 



Macilente. 



The whole com- 
pany unite in 
criticism of 
the victim. 

Macilente. 



Macilente. 



Macilente. 



Act. IV. 

Sc. I. Fungoso and Fallace are fur- 
ther portrayed. Deliro resolves to 
press Brisk for his debts. 

Sc. 2. Fallace sends Fungoso to warn 
Brisk. 

Sc. 3. Macilente tries to arouse Del- 
iro's jealousy, and fails. 

Sc. 4. Funtarvolo completes his plans 
for travel. 
Macilente describes Frisk's rebuff 

at court. 
Sogliardo, Shift, and Frisk carry on 
characteristic conversation. 

Sc. 5. Fungoso, \xi another new suit. 

Sc. 6. Macilente proposes to the 
others a plan to bring Saviolina 
" out of her humour " of self-con- 
ceit. General conversation. 
Fungoso &vi\.Q,x^, finds Brisk in yet an- 
other suit, and swoons. 

Act. V. 

Sc. I. Macilente poisons Sogliardo' s 
dog. 

Sc. 2. Saviolina is brought " out of her 
humour." 

Sc. 3. Fu7itarvolo misses his dog. 
Macilente accuses Shift of steal- 
ing it. Shift is terrorized into 
retracting his former boasts, and 
slinks away in disgrace 
Sogliardo is down-cast at the ex- 
posure of his friend. 

Sc. 4. Carlo taunts Puntarvolo, who 
seals his lips with wax. 
Carlo and Frisk are arrested. 

Sc. 5. Macilente gets Fallace to visit 
Brisk in prison. 



6o Structural Features of Jonsons Satiric Comedy. 



Macilente. 



Sc. 6. Fungoso repents of his follies. 
Deliro is incited by Macilente to 
bring an action for debt against 
Brisk. 
Sc. 7. Fallace, visiting Brisk in prison 
makes love to him. She is sur- 
prised by Deliro and Macilente. 
Macilente's envy is appeased. 



4. Structural Features of The Alchemist. 

In The Alchemist the relations between the victims and 
the victimizers are not quite so simple as in the two 
plays just treated. Hence the grouping here given 
holds good for the first part of the play, but needs 
modification for the latter part, as will appear in the 
detailed discussion. 

f Face, steward of Lovewit's House. " Cap- 

I tain Face" is his assumed name. 
Intriguers. ■{ Subtle, the Alchemist, pretending to power 

I in all the occult sciences. 

(^ Z>ol Common, a courtezan, their colleague. 

' Dapper, a lawyer's clerk. 

Drugger, a youth who has just set up a 
drug and tobacco shop. 

Sir Epicure Mammo7i, a wealthy Knight? 
whose characteristics are greed of 
wealth and proneness to every form of 
Victims. \ sensual indulgence. 

■ Tribulation Wholesome, ) ^^^-^^^^ ^\^qxs. 

Ananias, S 

Kastril, a young heir, come to town to 
learn the arts of swaggering and quar- 
reling. 

Dame Fliatit, his sister, a widow. 

Surly, a friend of Mammon, who suspects 
the Alchemist of fraud. 

Lovewit, owner of the house, by whom the 
resolution is occasioned. 



Structural Features of Jonsons Satiric Comedy. 6i 

Argument. — In the absence of Lovewit, his steward, under the 
name of Captain Face, invites Subtle and Dol Common to set up 
business in the empty house. They do so, and on various pretenses 
extort money from various customers. To Sir Epicure Mammon, 
Subtle promises the philosopher's stone, and Mammon brings loads 
of iron pots, tin pans, etc., to be turned into gold. Subtle has held 
out the same hopes to the Puritan Elders, and he sells to them 
Mammon's metal vessels, representing them to be " orphans' goods" 
and guaranteeing to turn them into gold when the process of making 
the stone shall have been consummated. Dapper and Drugger are 
less important victims, but young Kastril and his widow sister are 
valuable because Dame Pliant is a desirable matrimonial candidate. 
Face and Subtle quarrel for her, but Subtle gives way. He assures 
the widow that she is to marry a Spaniard, and they privately send 
Drugger for a Spanish costume, assuring him that he shall have 
her. 

Meanwhile Surly, who suspects the whole establishment, enters, 
disguised as a Spaniard. The ruse works, and Subtle and Face talk 
freely before him, thus betraying themselves. Surly discloses to 
Dame Pliant her dangerous position, and in return asks her hand in 
marriage. Face temporarily meets the crisis by setting Kastril, 
Drugger and Ananias on Surly, and they, ignorant of the real situa- 
tion, beat him out of doors. 

At this juncture Lovewit, master of the house, is heard outside, de- 
manding admittance. He is beset by neighbors, who relate the strange 
doings there have been during his absence. Face, having shaved 
and resumed his steward's garb, comes out and tries to pacify Love- 
wit and get him away. While they are talking Surly returns bring- 
ing Mammon, now undeceived, and officers to arrest the scoundrels. 
The Puritan Elders also appear with oflficers, and finally there are 
heard from within the cries of Dapper, who has been shut up to get 
him out of the way. Face, seeing the hopelessness of his case, con- 
fesses everything to his master, and promises him all their spoils, 
besides the widow, if he will pardon the abuse of his house. Love- 
wit agrees, and Face re-enters the house, gets possession of the 
trunks of valuables and then commands Siibtle and Dol to leave at 
once if they want to escape arrest. They accuse him of treachery, 
but there is no redress and they are forced to precipitate flight. 
Face invests Lovewit with the Spanish costume Drugger has brought 
and marries him to the widow. 

Surly finds no one to arrest, and discovers that the widow, too, has 
slipped through his hands. 

This play, like the preceding one, presents merely a 
series of trickeries. But it differs in the management 



62 Structural Features of Jonson's Satiric Comedy. 



of the latter part, where the conspirators are met with 
rather formidable opposition, headed by vSurly and rein- 
forced by some of the victims who begin to apprehend 
the cheat. Thus, whereas the first three acts progress 
quietly enough, the fourth and fifth involve radical 
changes in the relations of the persons. The grouping 
in the first three acts may be thus simply represented : 



Act I. 



Act. II. 



Act III. 



Face 

Subtle 

Dol 


\ dupe 


j Dapper 
\ D rugger 


Face 


} 


( Mammon 


Subtle 


V dupe 


\ Ananias 


Dol 


) 


i Drugger 
[Ananias 


Face 

Subtle 

Dol 


\ dupe 


1 Tribtilatiofi Wholesome 
\ Kastril 
1^ Dapper 



Act IV. starts out in the usual way, first with Mam- 
mon as the dupe, and then with Kastril and Dame Pliant. 
The duping of Mammon and of Kastril continues 
throughout the act, but the entrance of Surly, at the 
end of Scene i,in his Spanish disguise, introduces an ele- 
ment of opposition. For a time relations are reversed, 
and the intriguers are distinctly at a disadvantage. In 
Scene 2, Surly is presented to Dame Pliant. Scene 3 
carries forward the trick on Mammon, but in Scene 4 
Surly re-enters with the widow, having revealed to her 
his identity and warned her of her danger. Things 
look black for the intriguers, but when Surly throws off 
his disguise and threatens them with exposure Face 
meets the emergency by setting on the intruder two of 
the other dupes, Kastril and Drugger, while Ananias 
joins in abusing him on religious grounds connected 
with his "idolatrous" Spanish costume, and their com- 
bined attack forces Surly out of the house. 

At this moment a new element of opposition arises, in 
the arrival of Lovewit, which ends the act. 



Structural Features of Jonsoiis Satiric Comedy. 63 



The grouping in the act, is, then, as follows: 



Beginning of 
Scene i. 

End of 
Scene i. 

Scene 2. 
Scene 3. 



Scene 4. 



Mammon 
Kastril 
Dame Pliant 

Face 
Subtle 



Face \ 

Subtle >■ dupe 
Dol ) 

Surly dupes 

Face \ 

Subtle V dupe 
Dol ) 

Surly \ in open 

Dame PliantS conflict \ assisted by 
with ( ( Kastril 
\ Drugger 
{ Ananias 



Mammon 

C Face 
Subtle 



In other words, there occurs first a reversal of rela- 
tions — the dupers become dupes — and finally an open con- 
flict of forces in which Surly is worsted. 

In Act V. there are further modifications. The in- 
triguers are first menaced by Lovewit's presence, then 
Surly's return with Mammon and the officers adds to the 
danger. The other dupes enter, and failing to get 
admission they too take alarm and set out to get officers. 
Finally, Dapper's muffled cries precipitate the crisis. 

Up to this point the grouping has been: 

Lovewit 



Face 

Subtle 

Doll 



menaced by 



Surly 
Mammon 

with officers. 

Kastril 

Ananias 

Tribulation IVholesome 

Dapper 



64 Structural Features of /orison's Satiric Comedy. 

At this point Face, to save himself, breaks away from 
the other two, joins forces with Lovewit, brings Dame 
Pliant and Kastril to his side through the marriage, and 
is thus strong enough to face the remaining opposition. 
The new and final grouping is: 



Face >, 

Lovewit I get the 

Dame Pliant \ better of 
Kastril ] 



\ Subtle 
\ Doll 

\ Surly 
{ Mammon 

\ Anafiias 

i Tribulation Wholesome 
Drugger 
Dapper 

The play thus resembles Every Man in His Humour in 
that its basis is a series of tricks and impostures. It 
differs in that the relations between the persons are not 
constant, but undergo two rather radical alterations, the 
last one amounting to a complete reconstruction. In 
some ways the conclusion is like that of the earlier play. 
Lovewit, like Justice Clement, comes in from outside to 
preside over the resolution, and he pardons Face as 
Clement does Brainworm, "for the wit of the offence," 
though Lovewit has the added motive that the servant's 
offence has been most profitable to the master. 

There are, however, more interesting points of like- 
ness with Volpone, which will be discussed under the 
latter play. 

5, Structural Feature of Volpone. 

There is a^distinct sub-interest in this play, that of 
Sir Politick Would-be, which necessitates two sets of 
groups. 



Structural Features of Jonson's Satiric Comedy. 
For the main play: 



65 



Chief intrig- 
uers. 



Volpone, an old and wealthy Venetian 
noble. 
L Mosca, his parasite. 



r Voltore, an advocate. 1 
Corvino, a merchant. 
Corbaccio, a feeble old 
Chief victims. \ gentleman. 

Lady Politick Would- 
be, wife of Sir Pol- 
l itick. 



All are legacy- 
hunters who 
beset Vol- 
pone. 



J 



Temporarily f 
victims, but 
ultimately-l 

agents of the I ^'^^^' ^'^^ °^ Corvino. 
opposition. 



Bonario, son of Corbaccio. 



For the sub-interest: 

Peregrine, an Englishman, who ridicules and finally 

exposed Sir Politick's folly. 
Sir Politick Would-be, an Englishman who pretends to 

be keen in matters of politics and finance. 

Argument of the main plot. — Volpone, being beset by legacy- 
hunters, gets both amusement and wealth out of their attentions. 
He pretends to be at the point of death, and Mosca, his fertile- 
brained parasite, persuades each visitor in turn that he has hopes of 
being the heir, provided he continue showering attentions on the 
dying man. They therefore present Volpone with rich jewels, but 
scarely try to hide their eagerness for his death. Hearing of the 
beautiful wife of Corvino, one of these legacy-hunters, Volpone 
desires possession of her, and in the disguise of a mountebank doc- 
tor he succeeds in getting a glimpse of her at her window. Mosca 
goes to Corvino and tells him that Volpone is very feeble and that 
the physicians say that there is but one means to prolong his life, 
and this is that some young woman be procured to sleep by him and 
lend him vigor. Corvino is finally wrought upon to offer his wife, on 
Mosca's representation that this act will surely secure to him the in- 
heritance. Mosca, meeting Bonario, tells him, what is in fact the 
5 



66 Stn(ctural Features of Jotisons Satiric Comedy. 

truth, that his father, Corbaccio, has disinherited him, and made 
Volpone his heir, in hopes that Volpone will reciprocate. Bonario, 
distrustful, goes to Volpone's house to assure himself. While he is 
there Corvino comes, forcing in Celia. He leaves her with Volpone, 
who, throwing off his disguise of sick man, first woos her and then 
tries to force her. Hearmg her cries, Bonario rushes in, rescues her, 
and leaves the house vowing to punish such crime through the 
law courts. 

Mosca meets the danger by enlisting in his service all the legacy- 
hunters. Corvino's evident interest lies in facing down Celia's accusa- 
tions. Corbaccio's also lies in opposing the son he has disinherited, 
while the lawyer Voltore, not knowing all the facts, is glad to plead 
the cause of his patron. Mosca cleverly avoids arousing the jealousy 
of his assistants toward one another, and the trial goes against Bona- 
rio and Celia. the culminating point being when Volpone, apparently 
dying, is carried into court on a litter. 

Elated Avith such success, Volpone determines to give out that he 
has died and left Mosca sole heir. This is done, and the eager legacy- 
hunters, hurrying to the house to see the will, find Mosca, richly 
dressed, taking account of his possessions. Not content with watch- 
ing their discomfiture, Volpone pursues them in disguise, taunting 
them with their disappointment. At last, harassed and enraged, 
Voltore retracts the evidence he had given in court, thus exposing 
Mosca, Corbaccio and Corvino. Volpone, still in his disguise, listens 
with alarm, and whispers to Voltore that Volpone yet lives and has 
made him heir. Voltore thereupon returns to his first testimony. 

Meanwhile Mosca has determined to keep in earnest what his 
patron had given him in jest. He enters court and affirms Vol- 
pone's death, while the disguised Volpone asserts that he lives. 
Furious at his parasite's treachery, Volpone at last throws off his dis- 
guise; the whole matter is explained; Bonario and Celia are cleared 
and reparation is made them; Mosca is sent to the galleys, Volpone 
to prison for life; to the others is meted out appropriate punishment. 



This complicated plot has some striking points of cor- 
respondence with that of Tho. Alchcf?iist, and some with 
that of the tragedy, Sejanus. 

The schemes of the main action originate in two 
vicious characters acting together and imposing on oth- 
ers, getting out of their cozening both amusement and 
profit. They ridicule their victims as Face, Subtle and 
Dol do theirs, and the victims themselves are, as in The 



I 



Stnictural Features of Jonsons Satii'ic Comedy. 67 

Alchemist, for the most part scoundrels who scarcely 
deserve pity. Dame Pliant, in The Alchefnist, was an inno- 
cent if very foolish victim, but her counterpart Celia, 
in Volpo/ie, is a really pathetic figure. Her rescue by 
Bonario may be paralled with the attempted rescue of 
Dame Pliant by Surly and it will be remembered that in 
meeting Surly's aggression Face called in some of his 
dupes — Kastril, Drugger and Ananias — to his assistance, 
just as Mosca here calls in Voltore and the rest. There 
are important differences between the two incidents, 
which will be reverted to later. Finally, the Volpone- 
Mosca league like that of Face, Subtle and Dol, is 
threatened by a " turning of the worm " on the part of 
their dupes, and the league itself is finally broken, 
Mosca deserting his patron as Face deserted ^Subtle and 
Dol, though he does not escape punishment as Face did. 

As in The Alchemist, the grouping in the early part of 
the play is simple enough, the persons falling into the 
two lists of dupers and duped, but later on the opposi- 
tion arises; dupers and dupe coalesce for the moment; 
then the group disintegrates and the final resolution 
occurs. The beginning of the change, however, occurs 
in the third act of Volpone, instead of the fourth, giv- 
ing the play more nearly the usual form of a tragedy, 
whose turning-point commonly falls in the third act. 

The grouping in the acts is here given, for conven- 
ience of comparison with The Alchemist. 

17- ij. \ ( Voltore 

Volpone \ \ 

Act 1. \ dupe •< Corbaccio 

( Corvino 

Act II ^^^^^^^" I dupe Corvino 

Mosca S 

Act III. ^^-^^"^ [ du-oe Lady-Would-be 

Mosca \ ^ 

but later, 

Bojiario ) raise an op- j Volpone 
Celia f position to ( Mosca. 



68 Structural Features of Jonson's Satiric Comedy. 

as a result, Mosca affiliates with the 

legacy-hunters, and an open conflict 

follows, grouped thus: 

f Mosca 

I Volpone 

^ , TTT Bonario ] \ Voltore 

Act IV. ^ J. r versus S ^ z 

Ceha ) ' Corbaccio 

Co7'vi?w 

y Lady Would-be. 

Act V. The alliance is severed, and the 
grouping again becomes: 

f Voltore 
Volpone ) J . j Corbaccio 

y Lady Would-be 

finally, Voltore joins the opposition, 
Mosca breaks with Volpone, and retribu- 
tion overtakes alike dupers and duped. 

Before completing the discussion of the play, it is 
necessary to say a few words as to the usual requisites 
of a comedy. Comedy, as we have seen, finds its mate- 
rial wherever there is a departure from a recognized 
norm. The basis of judgment may be moral, as in Mo- 
liere's Tartuffe, or social, as in his Le Misanthrope. The 
first play assumes a norm of society based on honesty 
and fair-dealing; the vicious hypocrite is the exception 
and therefore the comic butt. The second assumes a 
norm of society based on convention, deceit and jeal- 
ousy; the honest man is the exception and therefore 
the comic butt. Similarly, The Alchemist is scaled for a 
world of witty rogues, and the one honest man in it, 
Surly, meets nothing but discomfiture, while the various 
rascals fare ill or well according to luck and their own 
brains. For the purposes of the comedian either 
assumption will serve — of a world of rogues or of hon- 
est men — provided only he carries us with him, makes 



Structural Features of Jonsons Satiric Cofnedy. 69 

us accept his position, at least temporarily.' In Le Mis- 
anthrope Moliere scarcely does this, inasmuch as we are 
inclined to sympathize with the comic butt, Alceste, 
instead of with the conventional society which rejects 
him. It is a sign of Jonson's success in preserving 
whatever tone he has taken, that his plays have been 
accepted without question as " moral," despite their fre- 
quent contravening or ignoring of moral laws. In The 
Alchemist more particularly, the necessary tone is pre- 
served without a break. The intriguers of the play do ■ 
actually, it is true, commit crimes, but their victims are 
criminal too, in intent if not in performance, and, thus 
left to choose between brilliant rascals and foolish ones, 
we side with the first. Dame Pliant's relations might, 
indeed, have been too serious for comedy, but they are 
not allowed to become so, and her final marriage is 
treated as lightly as the rest, it takes place off the stage, 
and, in fact, she herself appears in only three scenes 
and in these her lines are few and unimportant. Finally, 
Surly, an honest man, fares rather badly, but he is 
so treated as not to arouse very keen sympathy. His 
sneering tone is not attractive, and his discomfiture is 
not so serious as to claim our pity. He has merely inter- 
fered in other people's affairs, and, save for a little abus- 
ive language and a few knocks, he comes out with 
neither gain nor loss. 

Returning to Volpone, we note the contrast. As the 
play starts out, we are in a world of scoundrels again, 
but they are grimmer and their vices are more revolt- 
ing than those in The Alchemist. Perhaps the fact that 
here they are almost all old men makes part of the dif- 
ference; perhaps a part is due to the difference in the 
kind of victimizing. For the active, agile roguery of 
Subtle and Face is at least enlivening, but there is some- 
thing almost oppressive in the way Volpone lies back 
and lets vice expose itself before his gaze, while he en- 
joys the spectacle as a devil might enjoy watching sin. 

1 This is the basis of truth in the paradoxes of Lamb's essay On The A rtifuial Com- 
edy of the Last Century, though one can hardly accept all his conclusions. 



/ 



yo Structural Features of Jonsons Satiric Comedy. 

Furthermore, with the introduction of the Celia 
episodes whatever comic tone still remained is broken 
through. Uniting as they do what is revolting in motive 
with what is beautiful — almost gorgeous — in language, 
they introduce into the play an element which trenches 
on the tragic. Celia is not like Dame Pliant, Bonario 
is not like Surly. Both are high siDirited, pure-minded, 
and the spectacle of Celia facing first her husband 
and then Volpone, the court-room scene where she 
and her champion are crushed beneath what appears a 
damning weight of evidence — these are not scenes for 
comedy. The fact that there is actually no tragic 
calamity — that "no one slays or is slain" — and that 
Celia and Bonario are finally released by the court with 
apologies and an attempt at reparation, in no way com- 
pensates for what has gone before; the ground-tone of 
comedy, the comic color- scale, if one may use a figure, 
has been broken through, x. 

It may have been a sense of this that led Jonson to 
insert the episodes of Sir Politick Would-be, but if these 
are the result of an attempt to restore the comic balance 
the attempt was unfortunate. The vapid harangues of 
the fatuous but harmless gentlemen neither harmonize 
with the grim irony of the rest of the play nor do they 
furnish agreeable relief. 

In his management of the final resolution the author 
was more fortunate. The usual comic denouement where 
at least no one is hurt and every one is forgiven, was 
manifestly unfit, and recognizing this Jonson ventured 
to mete out to his persons punishment only less severe 
than death. That he did this deliberately, and some- 
what under compulsion of the conditions he had cre- 
ated, we may infer from his remarks in the Dedicatory 
Letter, where he apologizes for his departure from tra- 
ditional form.' 

" And though my catastrophe may, in the strict rigor of comic law, 
meet with censure .... I desire the learned and charitable 
critic, to have so mtich faith in me, to think it was done of industry." ' 



1 Dedication, Volpone: Works, III, 159. 



Structural Features of Jonsons Satiric Comedy. 71 

The play is, indeed, as near tragedy as comedy, and 
in structure it is transitional between the two. Many 
of its events are of the typical comic type, but the Celia 
episode, falling at the end of the third act, has the force 
of a climax such as one usually finds in a tragedy or 
serious drama in about this position. It serves, more- 
over, as a real turning point in the action, and is the 
ultimate cause of the catastrophe, though the immediate 
cause is the separation of Mosca and Volpone. The 
part of the play following this incident might almost be 
classed as a regular "return-action" such as is almost 
alwa5^s found in serious or tragic drama. 

The resemblance between this play and Sejanus has 
been already suggested. The tone in the tragedy is 
only a little grimmer, as the issues involved are larger. 
The central characters, Sejantis and Tiberius, are differ- 
ent from Volpone and Mosca, but their powers of intel- 
lect and imagination are not greater, nor does the lan- 
guage of the tragedy ever reach greater force and 
splendor than that of the comedy. Moreover, their 
structure has points of resemblance. At the beginning 
of the play the two gigantic criminals, Tiberius and 
Sejanus, are in league. Acting together they crush one 
after another of their enemies. At length, however, 
Sejanus presumes too far, he proposes his own marriage 
with Drusus' widow. The distrust of Tiberius is 
aroused, and he determines to crush his too-powerful 
favorite before he is himself over-topped. The last 
part of the play deals with the struggle between the 
two, ending in the annihilation of Sejanus. The union 
in crime of the two men, and then their swinging 
asunder, their relations to their victims and to each 
other, appear to be a tragic counterpart of the situa- 
tion in Volpone. 

As an actual fact, the order in which the plays were 
written is the reverse of that adopted in the present 
treatment. The date of Sejanus was 1603; of Volpone, 
1605; of The Alchemist, 1610. It is tempting to draw 



72 Structural Features of Jofisons Satiric Coitiedy. 

inferences based on this order, but these might be only- 
fanciful. Thus much is, however, clear: Volpone is the 
one of Johnson's comedies least like comedy. In its 
tone, in its character, in its story, in its structure, it 
leans towards tragedy. Perhaps the best thing to do 
with it would be to class it with Sejanus and Catiline as 
ironic drama. 



CHAPTER V. 



Jonson's Romantic Comedy. 

That Jonson had ever written an}^ but satiric humor- 
comedy is hard to realize, for we are accustomed to 
thinking of him as one whose powers, like those of his 
own humor-ridden creations, "ran all one way." And 
indeed, the mature Jonson is singularly unvarying in 
point of view and in practice. We might apply to him 
Aurelia's mocking reproach to her sister: 

'• What, true-stitch, sister! Both your sides alike! " > 

But unvarying as he seems, Jonson had his romantic 
period. A few years younger than Shakespeare, he was 
still doing hackwork of the stage, recasting old plays, 
and acting, while the elder poet was producing his early 
comedies — Love's Labour's Lost^ The Comedy of Errors, The 
Two Gentlejnen of Verona, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and 
The AIercha?it of Venice. It is difficult to suppose that 
Jonson should have been uninfluenced by this wonder- 
ful series of plays, even if we imagine him, according 
to the conventional picture, with his eyes glued to the 
page of Plautus and Terence and Seneca. Of such influ- 
ence we find few traces in his typical work and his 
expressed theory, but that it was for a time strong, 
parts of some of his plays and the whole of one give 
evidence. 

This one is The Case Is Altered^ produced apparently 
at the end of 1598, a few months after Every Man in His 
Humour. So different is this from his usual work, that 
it has been questioned whether the play really is Jon- 
son's. The earliest printed form known to us is a 



1 The Case Is Altered, Act II, Sc. 3; Works VI, 331. 

2 For the argument of this play cf. Appendix, pp. 05, 96. 



74 Jonsoiis Ro}7iantic Comedy. 

quarto of 1609, of which some copies give Jonson's 
name, others do not, and we may take our choice of two 
hypotheses: either Jonson's name was unwarrantably 
inserted by the printers, and taken out of some copies 
by the writer's own orders; or it was printed without 
credit to him, and his name afterwards inserted.' Thus 
far no other evidence is forthcoming. Gifford and Cun- 
ningham both accept the play as Jonson's, as do all his 
critics, except C. H. Herford who, in his introduction 
to the ' Mermaid ' edition of Jonson, writes: "The same 
year [1599!] probably produced a fourth [play], still 
extant, in which it seems equally clear that Jonson wrote 
a part, and that he did not write the whole — The Case Is 
Altered.'' ^ Mr. Herford gives no hint of his reasons 
either for dating the play a year later, or for denying 
its accepted authorship. The "part" written by Jonson 
is, we presume, Valentine's satirical description of the 
"Utopian" (English) stage, the hit at Anthony Mun- 
day, and the Jaques incident. But this last, which is 
unquestionably Jonson's, is so intimately bound in with 
the Rachel-plot that to accept it as Jonson's almost 
involves accepting work as unlike his usual manner as 
any in the play. 

Assuming, then, that the play is Jonson's, we have 
the interesting case of a purely "Romantic" comedy 
written by the greatest of the opposed school. It might 
almost be interpolated into the series of Shakespeare's 
comedies just mentioned — it would certainly be no more 
puzzling there than is All's Well that Ends Well in a later 
group. Structurally it is far above Love's Labour's Lost, 
though it has nothing so masterly as the great exposure 
scene of that play. If we had to place the play we 
should put it about with The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 
when Shakespeare's comedy was passing out of its 
stage of farce and situation, into its distinctive early 
form. 



1 Cf. Fleay: A Chronicle of the English Drama; I, 357-358. 

'•^ Herford: Introduction to The Best Plays 0/ Ben Jonson, p. xxv. 



Jonsons Roviantic Comedy. 75 

It may be worth while to pause a moment over these 
early plays. Love's Labour's Lost consists of one situation, 
the exposure of the four "forsworn" youths, — a scene 
worked out with a cleanness of stroke worthy of 
Moliere. Indeed the motive of the play and its atti- 
tude strongly suggest Moliere. Armado might be a 
study of a humor, and the catastrophe, where the four 
gentlemen are by the loving discipline of their ladies 
brought ' out of their humours ' is Jonsonesque. Biron's 
recantation: 

Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise, 
I do forswear them, and I here protest, 

Henceforth my wooing mind shall be express'd 
In russet yeas and honest Kersey noes.' 

finds a parallel — somewhat extravagant, indeed — in the 
litany of the reformed revellers in Cynthia's Revels: 

From Spanish shrugs, French faces, smirks, irpes, 
and all affected humors, 

Good Mercury defend us, etc' 

The Comedy of Errors, largely farcical, adds nothing, ex- 
cept perhaps a firmer grasp of the laws of structure and 
plot. But in The Two Gentlemen of Verona the note of " Ro- 
mantic Comedy " is clear. The interwoven love-plots give 
the delicate but firm setting, while Launce with his foil 
and victim Speed, serve as the most good natured of bur- 
lesques on the lofty raptures of the lovers. 

The likeness between this play and The Case Is Altered 
is rather interesting. In part it can be reduced to de- 
tails, in part it is a case of "atmosphere," or of the 
writer's attitude. One of the most striking points is the 
fact that the humor is the same. Onion and Juniper 
are, to be sure, not so bright as Launce and Speed, their 
humor is at once less funny and more coarse — there is 
no surer way of appreciating Shakespeare's delicate- 



' Love' s Labour s Lost, V, 2. 

2 Palinode, Cynthia's Revels, V, 3 ; Works, III, 337, 359. 



76 JonsoHS Roma r tic Co?/iedy. 

mindedness than to compare his humorous scenes with 
those of his contemporaries — but it is the same in kind, 
it is the comedy of sympathy. We laugh at Juniper, 
** sweet youth, whose tongue has a happy turn when he 
sleeps," and at Onion, the ardent lover of Rachel, but 
we are fond of the fellows, and our laugh is very differ- 
ent from that provoked by " Master Stephen," or by any 
of the rest of the "gulls" and fools of Jonson's world. 
Moreover, the use of the comic element is somewhat the 
same in both. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, following 
immediately on the farewell of Julia and Proteus, comes 
Launce's version of his own heartrending parting from 
his family — depicted the more graphically with the aid 
of his slippers and his stony-hearted dog. Again, hard 
upon Valentine, steeped in "endless dolor" at his ban- 
ishment from Silvia, comes Launce again with the 
announcement that he too is in love: — 

" He lives not now that knows me to be in love; yet I am in love; 
but a team of horse shall not pluck that from me; nor who 'tis I love; 
and yet 'tis a woman; but what woman I will not tell myself; and 
yet 'tis a milkmaid." ' 

The parody in The Case Is Altered is not so consistent 
nor so pointed, yet we can hardly miss the kindly satire 
implied in Onion's wooing of Rachel, even though it is 
separated by a whole act from the ardent pursuit of her 
by the various gentlemen of rank. 

Onion. O brave! she's yonder: O terrible! she's gone. 

Juniper. Yea, so nimble in your dilemmas, and your hyper- 
boles! Hey my love! O my love! at the 
first sight, by the mass. 

Onion. O how she scudded! O sweet scud, how she tripped! 
O delicate trip and go! ^ 

In the serious parts of the play the intermingling of 
jest and earnest suggests Shakespeare. The two young 



1 The Two Gentletnen of Verona, III, i. 

a The Case Is Altered, IV, 4; Works, VI, 364. 



/orison's Rojnantic Comedy. 77 

girls, introducing themselves through Aurelia's mock- 
solemn announcement: 

" Room for a case of matrons, colored black." 

enter the scene almost like another Rosalind and Celia 
— at least they might have been first studies for them. 
Paulo, the ardent young lover, and Angelo, his faithless 
friend, remind us of Valentine and Proteus; indeed in 
V, 3 the exposure of Angelo's treachery by his friend and 
their instantaneous reconciliation is a situation iden- 
tical with the conclusion of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. 

Only the character of Jaques is out of keeping with 
the rest. He is distinctly Jonsonesque,' and in his 
addresses to his gold we feel the power of the author of 
Volpone, though even here there is a reminiscence^ of 
Shakespeare in his cry: 

" Thou hast made away my child, thou hast my gold: 
******* 
The thief is gone, my gold's gone, Rachel's gone."^ 

Another point is the presence of sub-plots, or at least 
sub-interests. It is hard to decide what we can call the 
principal plot, but perhaps the Camillo-Gasper interest 
may serve as well as any. Besides this, we have: (i) the 
interests centering directly about Rachel, Paulo's love 
and Angelo's treachery being the central issues, while the 
infatuation of Ferneze, of Christophero and of Onion (!) 
are side interests; (2) the ijiterest centering round 
Jaques, his gold, and his secret; this shades into (3) the 
Juniper and Onion interests, while (4) Aurelia and Cha- 
mont form a very slight fourth interest. All these 
threads are dexterously interwoven to a loose but fairly 
even tissue, — too even, perhaps, for the lack of a predomi- 
nating group of characters is a fault.' 



' That he was modelled on Plautus is only another indication of this — such work was 
characteristic of Jonson. 

2 The Case Is Altered, V, i; Works, VI, 3S0. 

3 Nor is tlie texture without flaw; the two characters, Balladino and Francisco Colon- 
nia, are hangers-on in the play. The first was evidently inserted as a "local hit." The 
presence of the second seems unmotived. 



78 Jonson's Romantic Comedy. 

Finally, it will be noted that the comic element is 
found not in any of the more important plots, but in the 
under-issues or asides. This is a trait of the " Roman- 
tic "comedy; in Jonson's typical plays, the comic ele- 
ment is bound up with — is contained in — the main 
action. 

The play, then, is distinctly romantic, and if we ac- 
cept it as Jonson's it acquires peculiar significance as 
an indication of the kind of work he might have done 
in this field if he had chosen it for his mature activity.' 
That it was possibly written after his first play in his 
later manner need not be a difficulty,'' With a poet who 
worked as consciously and deliberatel}'- as Jonson it 
would have been quite possible to write a play in the 
accepted manner, even while he was in the act of break- 
ing away from that manner.' 

It is interesting to note that in this, his one "Romantic" 
comedy, Jonson follov/s the Roman comedians more 
closely than anywhere else. In the Jaques incidents the 
Atilularia was his model, in the Camillo-Gasper plot he 
was adapting from the Captivi. This would seem to bear 
out what was said in a preceding chapter as to the 
romantic possibilities of the Roman plots. The fact 
that Jonson so easily gave to his material the treatment 
needed to make these possibilities actual, is, moreover, 
an indication of his native power in other fields than 
those wherein he chose to excel. For this play, while 
not without faults, has in its manner a lightness of 
touch, in its humor a humaneness that is not equalled 
in the early work — scarcely in the mature work — of any 
contemporary save Shakespeare, That he turned aside 



• The Neiv Inn is sometimes called a romantic comedy, and with a degree of reason. 
Cf. Appendix, pp. 94, 95. On tlie other hand, the romantic fragment. The Sad S/u'/>herd, 
ought to be classed with Theocritus jind Spenser, as romantic pastoral, rather than with 
romantic comedy. 

2 Koeppel, however, thinks it was his first work. Cf. his Quelleti-Studien zu den 
Dramen Ben Jonson's, John Marsion^s und Beauntonf s und Fletcher's, pp. i, 19. 

' The hit at Anthony Munday, Act I, sc. i, may, indeed, be also a comment on some 
of the criticism to which the new play, Every Man in His Hutnour, must certainly have 
given rise. 



Jons oil's Romantic Comedy. 79 

to follow other courses we must, in the case of so con- 
scious and conscientious an artist, attribute to deliberate 
choice; and in making an estimate of him we ought not 
to ignore, as critics have sometimes done, these two of 
his works wherein he showed other powers than those 
which he ordinarily allowed free play. Lightly to set 
aside J'he Case Is Altered and The Sad Shepherd as excep- 
tions which need not be considered "in making up the 
main account " is only to justify the poet's slurs on " the 
world's coarse thumb and finger." Exceptional they 
are, but not accidental or unimportant. 

Perhaps Jonson was right in choosing as he did, since 
in the work which he made characteristically his own 
he had no equal, whereas in the realms that he aban- 
doned he would have had one superior. Yet the lover 
of Jonson cannot but find something pathetic in this 
self-imposed narrowing of his mighty powers, — cannot 
but wish that in determining the direction of his artis- 
tic genius, in pruning its growth, he had been a little 
less severe, less ruthless. 



APPENDIX. 

Brief Discussion of the Comedies not Already 
Treated. 



82 Appendix. 

Cynthia's Revels. 

Of this play Gifford himself confesses that " the plot 
of the drama is so finely spun that no eye perhaps but 
Jonson's has ever been able to trace it."' After such 
an admission, from such a source, there is no need to say 
that the structure of the play is hardly worth comment. 
The story, such as it is, is as follows: 

Cynthia ordains a night of revels. In her court, though not in her 
immediate train, are a number of courtiers and ladies characterized 
by various kinds of folly. 

Mercury, sent by Jove, summons Echo from hiding and permits 
her to give expression to her grief. At the close of her lament she 
christens anew the fountain of Narcissus, calling it the Fountain of 
Self Love. Mercury and Cupid now disguise themselves as pages 
and enter the service of a courtier and a lady. 

The courtiers and ladies all drink of the Fountain of Self Love, 
and are even more lost in self-esteem than before. Their prime 
aversion is Crites, described as a perfect man, who is a member of 
the intimate circle of Cynthia's attendants. The courtiers revile 
him, but he is indifferent to their abuse. They arrange a tourna- 
ment in the arts of Courtship, in which one of their number, Asotus, 
challenges all comers. Mercury, disguised as a Frenchman, and 
Crites, accept the challenge and worst their antagonists, subjecting 
them to merciless ridicule. 

In Cynthia's honor, Crites arranges a masque, wherein the courtiers 
and ladies, with Mercury and Cupid, take part. During the dance 
Cupid tries to use his arrows on some of the company, but finds that 
the "Waters of Self Love annul the efficacy of his charms. 

Cynthia orders the dancers to unmask. Cupid is discovered and 
is censured for daring to intrude. The others are committed by 
Cynthia to Crites for correction. He imposes a penance, and directs 
them finally to drink of the well of knowledge. 



There is no need of analysis. The play has no pecu- 
liar features, and is chiefly significant as showing all 
the faults of Jonson's method and none of the virtues. 
Crites, who evidently stands for Jonson, is insufferably 
self-righteous, and if Jonson had been more keenly 



1 Gifford's note to the play; Works, II, 136. 



Appendix. 83 

alive to the comic in himself, the character would never 
have been created. 

Cupid and Mercury, too, act merely as critics of the 
other characters. One section of the play is worth call- 
ing attention to, because it is an extreme instance of 
Jonson's habit of portraying a character by letting 
someone else talk about it: — in Moulton's phrase, " alleg- 
ing " character rather than "presenting" it. ' The part 
in question is the whole of Act II, which may be summed 
up thus: 

Cupid and Mercury enter, as pages. After a few preliminary 
words, Mercury describes Hedon to Cupid. 

Hedon and Anaides (two courtiers) enter, and converse a few 
moments, then go off. 

Cupid thereupon asks Mercury who Anaides is, and Mercury 
describes him at length. 

Amorphus and Asotus (two other courtiers) enter, and converse a 
few moments, then go off. 

Cupid asks Mercury who Asotus is, and Mercury responds with a 
yet longer description of him. 

Finally " Crites passes over the stage," and Mercury launches into 
a warm eulogy of his perfections. 

This finishes up the men. The women begin to enter, 
and it is Cupid's turn. 

First, " Argurion passes over the stage." Cupid describes her in 
full, imtil Mercury interrupts with, " Peace, Cupid, here comes more 
work for you, another character or two," and three more ladies 
enter. Phantaste, Moria, and Philautia. 

Moria utters a sentence, and Mercury asks: "Good Jove, what 
reverend gentlewoman in years may this be? " Cupid answers with 
an elaborate description, until Mercury cries, " O, I prithee no more, 
I am full of her," and the reader gives him quick sympathy. Cupid 
next describes Philautia, and after the ladies have exchanged a few 
more words he unweariedly starts to describe Phantaste, but Mer- 
cury has had enough, and breaks in with " Her very name speaks 
her, let her pass." 

Pages pass across the stage to get water from the Fountain of Self 
Love, and the act closes. 

No comment is needed. 



' Cf. Supra, pp. 31-33. 



84 Appendix. 

The Poetaster. 

Argument. — The scene is laid in Rome in the time of Augustus. 
The poet Ovid, despite the reproaches of his father, neglects the 
study of the law and spends his time writing verses in the company 
of his mistress, Julia, daughter of Augustus. His companions are 
Gallus and Tibullus, with their mistresses. They assemble at the 
house of Albius, a citizen, whose pretty wife, Chloe, longs to join in 
court life, and is instructed in it by Cytheris, Gallus' mistress. To 
the company are added Captain Tucca, a whimsical, bragging ras- 
cal who lives on his friends, and Crispinus, the " Poetaster," who 
writes bad verses and hates Horace for his talent and position. Chloe 
is deeply impressed by Tucca and also by Crispinus, both of whom 
pay her attentions by which her husband Albius considers himself 
honored. 

The company are invited by Julia to a court banquet, at which the 
guests impersonate the several gods, Ovid being Jupiter, and Julia, 
Juno. In the midst the revels are interrupted by the entrance of 
Caesar and Horace who have been informed of the event by the 
tribune, Lupus. Caesar, enraged at discovering his daughter in such 
company, orders her imprisonment and Ovid's banishment. The 
others are pardoned. 

Crispinus and Tucca, in retaliation for what they choose to consider 
Horace's malice, accuse him of treason, and the credulous tribune 
Lupus arrests him and Mecaenas. They easily clear themselves, 
and Caesar punishes their accusers. A counter-accusation is then 
brought against Crispinus and another writer, Demetrius, for libel- 
ling Horace in a play. They are convicted and Horace administers 
to Crispinus some pills to purge him of the impossible words he 
uses in his writing. He vomits these words up in succession and is 
then directed to maintain a careful diet, eschewing all but classic 
authors. 

In 1)he course of the play episodic scenes are inserted to satirize the 
characters of Crispinus, Demetrius and Tucca, and to magnify the 
virtues of Horace. 



The act-structure is in no way significant, nor is the 
play as a whole, except as a personal satire on men of 
Jonson's time. Undoubtedly most of the characters if 
not all were meant to stand for real persons. Horace is 
Jonson, Crispinus is Marston, Demetrius is Dekker. The 
rest are less certain. ' Being thus deliberately planned 

1 For a full discussion of this question, cf. J. H. Penniman's The War of the 
Theatres. 



Appendix. 85 

for purposes of personal invective, the play has little 
dramatic interest. Jonson seems scarcely to have tried 
to put it into good form. 



Epicoene, or The Silent Woman. 

Argument. — Morose, a rich old man, has an abhorrance of any 
noise except the sound of his own voice. Some practical jokes have 
been played on him by the young people who know him, and he 
attributes them all to his nephew and heir, Dauphine. Accordingly 
he disinherits him, and plans to marry that he may have a son of his 
own to come into his wealth. Hearing of a woman of so few words 
that she is dubbed "the Silent Woman," he has her brought to him 
and marries her. 

Dauphine and two friends, Clerimont and Truewit, have been 
invited by a silly dandy, La-Foole, to a banquet which he means to 
hold at the house of his kinswoman. Mistress Otter. The other 
guests are the " collegiate ladies," Haughty, Centaure, and Mavis, 
with Sir John Daw, and Captain Otter. Dauphine, Clerimont and 
Truewit, learning of Morose's marriage, persuade the company 
to transfer their banquet to Morose's house. The change is made, 
and the company invades the bridegroom's house. The bride now 
proves as talkative as the other ladies, the banqueters indulge in 
noisy revelry and Morose flees in consternation to the remotest nook 
in his house. 

After the discovery that his wife can talk. Morose tries to get a 
divorce. The three young men send him two accomplices, disguised 
as a clergyman and a lawyer, to advise him, but no remedy seems 
available. As he is in despair, Dauphine promises to relieve him of 
his noisy spouse if he in turn will give up part of his income, and 
guarantee the entire inheritance to his nephew. Morose agrees, and 
Dauphine then removes the Silent Woman's disgtiise, and shows her 
to be really a boy, whom Dauphine had trained to act this part. 

An elaborate episode is the joke played by the young men upon 
Daw and La-Foole. Both are cowards, and each is persuaded that 
the other is seeking his life. In the presence of the ladies, Daw 
allows himself to be kicked by Dauphine, whose face is muffled so that 
he passes for La-Foole. La-Foole is then blind-folded and similarly 
abused by Dauphine, whom he takes to be Daw. Other tricks are 
played on these two "gulls ' and others of the partj'. 



86 Appendix. 

The play is a farcical embodiment of the typical Jon- 
sonian comedy. Its action has, however, more unity 
than many of the plays. It has fewer characters, and 
the episodes are carefully subordinated to the main 
action, which is the trick on Morose. There is the 
usual division into dupers and duped, Morose being the 
chief victim, La-Foole and Daw subordinate ones, while 
the three friends aim a running fire of ridicule at the 
rest of the company, especially at the "collegiate 
ladies " who are counterparts of the French preciuses. 



Bartholomew Fair. 

Argument. — Mistress Littlewit and her husband are anxious to 
see the sights of Bartholomew Fair. They manage to overcome the 
religious scruples of Mrs. Littlewit's Puritan mother, Dame Pure- 
craft, and of her spiritual adviser, Zeal-of-theland Busy, and all four 
go to eat roast pig at the Fair. 

To the Fair also comes Bartholomew Cokes, a half-witted wealthy 
youth, with his man Waspe, and Grace Wellborn, whom he is to marry. 
She is averse to the match, but her guardian, Justice Overdo, is 
Cokes' brother-in-law, and compels the marriage to keep Grace's 
wealth in the family. In the confusion of the Fair, Cokes loses the 
rest of his party; he gets his pocket picked, his hat, cloak and sword 
are stolen, and he turns up at the end of the play like a plucked 
chicken. 

Two young men, Quarlous and Winwife, have been wooing Dame 
Purecraft, but now fall in love with Grace, who is willing to marry 
any intelligent and respectable man rather than the fool Cokes. She 
chooses by lot, and Winwife is designated. Quarlous then resumes 
his attentions to Dame Purecraft, and succeeds in getting her 
promise. 

Justice Overdo comes to the Fair in disguise, in order the better to 
ferret out roguery and be able to punish it. He however misunder- 
stands what he sees, mistakes vice for virtue, and in the course of 
his meddling gets beaten and put in the stocks. 

Zeal-of-the-land Busy also meets the same fate as punishment for 
his denunciation of the heathen follies of the Fair. 

Winwife, by a trick, succeeds in getting Justice Overdo's signature 
to a marriage license for himself and Grace. 



Appendix. 87 

All the important persons finally assemble at a puppet-show, 
where a play written by Littlewit is presented. Zeal-of-the-land 
Busy breaks in to remonstrate against all stage plays, but is Avorsted 
in argument. Justice Overdo then throws off his disguise, and 
begins to make accusations based on his observations during the 
day, but is shamed into silence by the discovery of his wife in a 
rather disgraceful situation. He gives over his attempt at justice, 
and invites all the company to his house to supper. 



It would be useless to give an account of all the inci- 
dents which occur as episodes in the play. The argu- 
ment as stated indicates the general scheme, and the 
character of the comic action. The victim-in-chief is 
Bartholomew Cokes. He sums up his adventures fairly 
comprehensively when in the fourth act he says plaint- 
ively: 

"Do but carry me home I have lost myself, and my 

cloke, and my hat, and my fine sword, and my sister, and Numps, 
[i. e. his man, Humphrey Waspe], and mistress Grace, a gentlewoman 
that I should have married, and a cut-work handkerchief she gave 
me, and two purses, to-day; and my bargain of hobby horses and 
gingerbread, which grieves me worst of all. " ' 

Other victims are, Justice Overdo, Waspe, and Zeal-of- 
the-land Busy. The rest are less important. The chief 
intriguers are Edgworth, a pick-pocket; Nightengale, a 
ballad-singer in league with him; Quarlous and Win- 
wife. The rest of the characters are sometimes duped 
themselves, sometimes dupers of others. 

The plan of the play allows the widest license in the 
treatment, which has a character of spontaneity and 
freedom from pharisaism rather rare in Jonson. The 
quality of the comic is coarse but, on the whole, healthy. 
If we except The Case Is Altered, the laughter in this play 
is the most good-natured Jonson ever indulged in. 



1 Act IV, Sc. 2; Works, IV, 448. 



88 Appendix. 

The Devil is An Ass. 

Argument. — Pug, a devil, begs Satan to let him visit earth. Satan 
warns him that he cannot cope with the wickedness of mortals, but 
allows him to try his luck for a single day. Pug enters the body of a 
criminal, just hung, steals some clothes, and engages himself as a 
serv^ant to Fitzdottrel, a gentleman. Fitzdottrel has been imposed 
upon by Meercraft, a " projector," i. e. one who offers elaborate plans 
for making men suddenly rich. He has promised Fitzdottrel to 
recover the " drowned lands" of England for him, and make him 
•' Duke of Drown'd-land," and meanwhile he gets money out of the 
future duke. Meercraft in his turn has to divide his gains with a 
thriftless cousin named Everill, who threatens blackmail if money is 
refused. 

Fitzdottrel has a pretty wife, with whom a young man, Wittipol, is 
in love. To get a glimpse of her, Wittipol offers Fitzdottrel a costly 
cloak, on condition of being allowed to talk to his wife, in his pres- 
ence for a quarter of an hour. Fitzdottrel agrees, and during the 
quarter hour Wittipol openly makes love to Mrs. Fitzdottrel and tells 
her what a fool her husband is. 

After the interview, Wittipol discovers that his friend Manly's 
apartments are opposite Mrs. Fitzdottrel's across a narrow street. 
He succeeds in procuring an interview with the lady, but they are 
discovered by her husband, who challenges Wittipol. Fitzdottrel had 
been informed of the interview by his servant Pug, who had pre- 
viously made love to Mrs. Fitzdottrel and been repulsed. 

Fitzdottrel, expecting to be shortly made duke, fears that his wife 
may not comport herself as befits his new dignity and Meercraft sug- 
gests that she be sent to a Spanish Lady, who gives instruction 
in manners. Fitzdottrel agrees, and sends hy Pug a valuable ring 
to the Spanish Lady, with a request that she receive his wife. This 
lady is a figment of Meercaft's, and the impostor now casts about for 
some one to act the part and share with him the profits of the office. 
Wittipol agrees to act, for the sake of seeing Mrs. Fitzdottrel. He 
disgm'ses himself as a lady, and meets Mr. and Mrs Fitzdottrel. 
Fitzdottrel is deeply impressed by the Spanish Lady, and after com- 
mitting his wife to her care proceeds to make over to her temporarily 
his estate also, as a preliminary to pursuing his quarrel with Witti- 
pol. Meercraft whispers to the lady that this will not be valid, and 
suggests that his own name be used instead. Wittipol, however, (as 
the Spanish Lady) wisely bids Fitzdottrel make Manly the feoffee, 
and this is done. 

Wittipol meanwhile has revealed to Mrs. Fitzdottrel his identity, 
and offered her his devotion. She begs him to be her true friend, 
not her lover, and to help her against the follies of her husband. He 



Appendix. 89 

reponds to the appeal, and after the deed of feoffment is drawn, 
throws off his disguise and tells Fitzdottrel that he is a fool, and his 
wife is too good for him. Moreover, he refuses to give up the deed of 
the estates. 

Fitzdottrel, by the advice of Meercraft and Everill, now pretends 
to be possessed of a devil, and accuses his wife of witchcraft, thus 
hoping to prove that the deed of the estates was invalid. In his 
ravings he accuses Wittipol and Manly as well, and quite convinces 
Justice Eitherside, who is called in to hear the testimony. 

Meantime. Pug has been arrested by the man from whom he 
stole his clothes, and sent to Newgate, whence he is rescued by 
Satan, who carries him off back to Hell. An explosion accompanies 
this event, and the wardens entering find only the dead body of the 
thief, and clouds of brimstone fumes. News of the event reaches 
Justice Eitherside as Fitzdottrel is in his raving The realization 
that he has had a real devil for servant startles him out of his part, 
and he confesses the hoax. Manly and Wittipol in turn testify to 
the blameless character of his wife. 



The play has the characters and the turn of plot 
familiar to readers of Jonson. There is the comic butt 
Pug, to take general abuse and occasional beatings; 
there is the familiar impostor, Meercraft, and his chief 
dupe, Fitzdottrel, with less important victims who have 
been passed over in giving the argument; there are the 
young men, Manly and Wittipol, who always control 
events for their own purposes. Thus in its general 
nature the play shows nothing new, while in its detailed 
working out it is full of reminders of earlier work: 
Meercraft has traits like Sir Politick in Volpone and like 
Subtle in The Alchemist; the ladies who talk with the 
Spanish Lady make us think of the coUegiates in Epi- 
coene, though the treatment here is by no means so mas- 
terly; indeed, the whole plan of the scene where Witti- 
pol plays the role of lady is similar to the scenes in the 
earlier play where the Silent Woman plays her part. 
There is, however, in this play no clear line of action as 
is the case where Jonson is at his best. The author 
appears to be trying to do too many things at once. He 
does net seem able to manage all his characters, and the 



go Appendix. 

play has too many loose ends, so that it lacks the merits 
of either spontaneity on the one hand or careful finish 
on the other. 



The Staple of News. 

Argument. — Pennyboy Junior, a youth just of age, has by his 
father's sudden death come into his inheritance. The first to inform 
him of his father's death was an old beggar, or " canter," whom out 
of gratitude the joyful heir keeps with him. Picklock, his father's 
lawyer, informs the youth that he was by his father destined ^ to 
marry the Lady Pecunia, Infanta of the mines, who is now in the 
care of his uncle, Pennyboy Senior. Pennyboy Jr., therefore, visits 
her and is well received. 

There has just been established an office, called the Staple of 
News, which claims to issue none but the most reliable news, col- 
lected from all over the world. The heir visits the office and takes 
Pecunia to see it. The officials crowd about her, and Cymbal, mas- 
ter of the office, woos her, hoping to secure her favor for their enter- 
prise. 

In honor of his lady, Pennyboy Jr. invites them all to dinner at 
the Apollo. Here he sets on the rest to compliment his lady, and in 
his delight at each new compliment makes her kiss the author of it. 
The merriment rises, and when Pennyboy Sr. breaks in and tries to 
get the lady and her attendants to return to his house, they flatly 
refuse, and he is kicked out by the young men. 

In the midst of the feast, however, the supposed beggar throws 
off his rags and reveals himself as the father of the heir. He tells 
the astonished company that he had his death given out that he might 
see how his son would manage riches. He ends by reproaching the 
youth for his prodigality and for his foolishness in making his lady's 
favors common property, and tells the boy that having abused wealth 
he shall try beggary for a while. 

Picklock, however, hopes to gain something for himself out of the 
complication. He had been in the secret, and had held in trust the 
deed of the Pennyboy property, and he now approaches the young 
heir with the proposal that they retain these papers and compel the 
father to yield. The father comes in and demands them, but Pick- 
lock now declares that they were left him not in trust but in absolute 
gift. Pennyboy Jr., however, now sides with his father, he reveals 
Picklock's recent pfroposal which had involved an admission of the 



Appendix. g i 

trust, and produces a witness who had heard the conversation from a 
place of concealment. Picklock, moreover, learns that the deeds have 
accidentally been delivered to the wrong party and finds himself 
thus completely foiled. 

This brings about a reconciliation between father and son, and 
they go with Pecunia to visit Pennyboy Sr., who has gone mad 
because of the desertion of his niece. They find him keeping a law 
court, with his two dogs as criminals. The return of Pecunia 
restores him to his reason, and he promises to abandon his miserly 
ways. He gives over the lady, as well as all his possessions, to Pen- 
nyboy Junior. 



As has already been pointed out,' the most interesting 
thing in this play is its use of allegory in the passages 
where the Lady Pecunia appears. Thus the usurer, Pen- 
nyboy Senior, says to her: 

"All this nether world 
Is yours, you command it, and do sway it; 
The honor of it, and the honesty, 
The reputation, ay, and the religion, 
(I was about to say, and had not err'd,) 
Is queen Pecunia's : for that style is yours. 
If mortals knew your grace, or their own good.^ 

The point of the play is certainly the moral it enforces 
as to the proper use of wealth, but the reader's mind is 
somewhat confused by the fact that the play is only 
partly allegorical. Pennyboy Junior has real wealth, 
which he inherits, and with which he pays his tailor 
and his hatter; but he also has this symbolic or figura- 
tive wealth in the person of the lady Pecunia. He 
spends his real gold lavishly, and he is also prodigal in 
bestowing on others his lady's favors. His uncle, on the 
other hand, has the opposite vice of miserliness. Pecu- 
nia and her maids thus accuse him: 

Pecunia. " Never unfortunate princess 
Was used so by a jailor. Ask my women: 
Band, you can tell, and Statute, how he has used me, 
Kept me close prisoner, under twenty bolts 



' Of. supra, pp. 36, 37. 

^ The Staple of Nezus, Act II, Sc. i; Works V, 190, 191. 



92 Appendix. 

Statitte. And forty padlocks 

Band. All malicious engines 
A wicked smith could forge out of his iron; 
As locks and keys, shackles and manacles, 

To torture a great lady 

*********** 

Pecunia. But once he would have smother'd me in a 
chest. 
And strangled me in leather, but that you 
Came to my rescue then, and gave me air. 

Statute. For which he cramm'd us tip in a close box, 
All three together, where we saw no sun 
In one six months.^ 

Finally, Pecunia herself thus exhorts the spectators: 

"And so Pecunia herself doth wish, 
That she may still be aid unto their uses. 
Not slave unto their pleasures, or a tyrant 
Over their fair desires; but teach them all 
The golden mean; the prodigal how to live; 
The sordid and the covetous how to die: 
That, with sound mind; this, safe frugality." - 

There is nothing further of interest in the structure 
of the play. Its treatment of allegory, however, might 
reward special investigation, especially when consid- 
ered in connection with the quasi-allegorical work of 
other satirists. 



The Magnetic Lady. 

Argument. — Sir Moth Interest, an unscrupulous usurer, has for 
many years had the keeping of his niece Placentia's dowrj', which at 
her mother's death was given into his charge to be paid down when 
the girl should make such a marriage as met the approval of her 
aunt, Lady Loadstone. Placentia has several suitors, and all gather 
at Lady Loadstone's house. Compass, a friend of Lady Loadstone, 



1 Works, V, 260, 261. 
^ lb., 291. 



Appendix. 93 

plans a dinner to be held there, and persuades his brother, Captain 
Ironside, to join them. At the dinner Ironside gets into a quarrel 
with Sir Diaphanous Silkworm, an elegant courtier, one of the suitors 
for Placentia's hand. The captain grows violent and the guests are 
terrified, especially Placentia, who is carried swooning to her room. 
The doctor is summoned, and it is presently rumored that the young 
girl has given birth to a child. The news reaches Sir Diaphanous 
and the captain just as they are about to fight a duel. They are 
instantly reconciled, for Sir Diaphanous considers himself indebted 
to the captain, since his violence was the indirect means of exposing 
the character of the lady Sir Diaphanous had hoped to marry. The 
knight promptly retracts his offers of marriage, as do the other 
suitors. 

Compass meanwhile chances to overhear a conversation between 
Placentia's nurse and Mistress Polish, an attendant of Lady Load- 
stone's, by which he learns that Placentia is reallj' Polish's daughter, 
while Pleasance, Placentia's maid, who has been passed off by Polish 
as her own child, is really the heiress. Compass has long loved 
Pleasance, and acting on his new knowledge he secretly marries her. 

Sir Moth Interest is rejoiced at the news regarding Placentia, as it 
releases him from any obligation to pay the dowry. But through the 
efforts of Polish and the nurses the rumor is denied. One of the 
suitors, Bias, to whom Sir Moth has lent money, now agrees to 
marry Placentia and to be satisfied with the payment of the original 
dowry, without interest, and minus a certain amount which Sir Moth 
has lent him. On these terms Sir Moth pushes the marriage, and 
announces it to the assembled household. Compass, however, pro- 
duces his evidence that Pleasance is the heiress, and Sir Moth is 
finally obliged to pay the dowry with interest. The rumor concern- 
ing Placentia now proves well-founded, and Bias withdraws from the 
contract, and Placentia is left to marry the steward, Needle, father 
of her child. Lady Loadstone offers herself in marriage to Captain 
Ironside. 



The plot of the play is, in the prominence given to 
the serious plot, and in the character of this plot, a little 
like some of the Roman comedies. The supposedly 
comic situations are found in the discomfiture of the 
various victims. 

The traces of allegory in the treatment of Lady Load- 
stone and Captain Ironside have been already noted.' 

^ Cf. Supra, p, 37. 



94 Appendix. 

It is hard to see why Jonson chose to insert them, for 
their " magnetic " qualities have nothing to do with the 
play. 



The New Inn. 

Argument. — Lord and Lady Frampul had two daughters. Lady 
Frampul, downcast by her husband's grief at having no sons, left 
her home and was not heard of again. The younger daughter also 
disappeared. Lord Frampul, filled with remorse, set but in search 
of his wife, but for long years failed to find her. In their absence, 
the remaining datighter, assuming the title of Lady Frampul, ruled 
the estate. Here the play opens. 

Lord Lovell, melancholy through love of Lady Frampul, is lodged 
at the New Inn. There arrive at the inn Lady Frampul herself, 
with her maid, Prudence, and two of her followers. Lords Latimer 
and Beaufort. The lady has purposed to have a day of merriment 
and has appointed Prue queen of the revels. Prue invites Lord 
Lovell to join the party, and after some hesitation he consents. 

Lady Frampul being alone with so many gentlemen, Prue plans 
to give her support by dressing up the host's son. Frank, as a lady. 
This is done and he is introduced to the company as Lady Frampul's 
kinswoman, Letitia. Lord Beaufort instantly falls in love with her. 
Prue now decrees that Lord Lovell shall spend two hours of the day 
in speaking before Lady Frampul the praises of love, his reward to 
be a kiss for each hour. The court being set, Lord Lovell fulfills his 
first hour, praising love to such good effect that the Lady becomes 
really in love with him. 

At this moment a new lady is announced, who, on being brought 
up, proves to be the wife of Lady Frampul's tailor, dressed, more- 
over, in the very gown which had been specially ordered for Pru- 
dence for this day. The woman is stripped of the gown and sent 
home in disgrace. 

The second hour now comes, in which Lovell, at Lady Frampul's 
request, changes bis theme from love to valor. At the end the 
second kiss is given, and then, Prue forbidding all further mention 
of love, Lovell goes disconsolate to bed. 

At this moment it is learned that Lord Beaufort has married the 
lady he has been so industriously courting. As the newly-made 
couple enter, the host pulls off the lady's disguise and exhibits his 



Appendix. 95 

son, Frank. But in the midst of the laugh that follows. Frank's old 
nurse enters, crying distractedly that her daughter is ruined, married 
to a stranger. It is now discovered that Frank is really a girl after 
all, who had been brought as a child to the host, and sold to him by 
the old nurse. Beaufort now refuses to hold to the marriage with a 
foundling; whereupon the nurse announces that the child is no other 
than Letitia, younger sister of Lady Frampul, while the nurse is 
really her mother, the elder Lady Frampul. At this the Host reveals 
himself as Lord Frampul, and the family are thus reunited. Lord 
Frampul gives his younger daughter to Beaufort, the elder one to 
Lord Lovell, while Prue is married to Lord Latimer. 

There are a number of interspersed scenes in which the servants 
of the house figure. The comedy of these scenes is purely episodic 
and very poor. 



The setting- of this play has a romantic cast, and with 
different treatment the play might have been made a 
"romantic" comedy. As it stands it can scarcely be 
called such; too much bulk is devoted to the low comedy 
of the servant scenes and to the incident of the tailor's 
wife, while the other parts have not the right touch; 
the treatment is a surface one without being delicate or 
light. The discourses on love and honor are dispropor- 
tionately long, and the work as a whole is heavy. Yet 
it is quite diverse from Jonson's typical manner. There 
is in the main action no attempt at satire, there are no 
intriguers and no victims, and the resolution is a result 
of chance, whose end is to make marriages, not to ex- 
pose folly and vice. On the whole, then, the play is 
nearer the romantic than the satiro-comic type, but 
when contrasted with The Case Is Altered, it shows that 
Jonson's hand had lost the cunning of earlier years. 



The Case Is Altered. 

Akgumeist.— Count Ferneze, of Milan, has one son, Paolo, anothei 
having been lost in infancy. Paolo, about to depart with the Milan- 
ese General, Maximilian, to fight against the French, confesses to his 



96 Appendix. 

friend Angelo that he loves a poor girl, Rachel, daughter of Jaques, 
a Jew, who is apparently poor, but who really possesses a hoard of 
gold. Angelo promises to be her protector. He himself, however, 
falls in love with her, as do also Ferneze, his steward Christophero, 
and Onion, a groom of the palace. Christophero and Ferneze both 
ask Jaques for Rachel in marriage, which throws him into violent 
perturbation lest they suspect his riches. Ferneze, hearing that Paolo 
is taken prisoner, is recalled to paternal duty and relinquishes the 
pursuit of Rachel. 

Maximilian returns from battle, bringing as prisoners Lord Cha- 
mont and Gasper, his servant. Ferneze proposes to exchange them 
for his son, and sends the servant to arrange the affair. In reality, 
however, it is Lord Chamont whom he sends, for tfie prisoners had 
changed names. When it is too late, Ferneze discovers the cheat, 
and in his rage threatens to kill Gasper. 

Meanwhile Angelo plots to get possession of Rachel. He pretends 
to be helping Christophero in his suit, and shows him how to lure 
Jaques away from the house. Angelo promises to steal Rachel while 
Jaques is away, and bring her to Christophero. To Rachel he saj'S 
that Paolo is returning and wishes to meet her. On this understand- 
ing Rachel accompanies him, but she soon discovers that Angelo's 
real purpose is to get her in his power. 

At this juncture Paolo, who has just been exchanged, really 
appears and rescues Rachel. Angelo, overcome with contrition, is 
forgiven for his treachery. 

Maximilian, thinking that his son will not return, is about to kill 
Gasper, when Paolo arrives with Chamont. It is then discovered 
that Gasper is really Ferneze's other son, thought dead, and that 
Rachel is a long lost sister of Chamont. Chamont marries one of 
Ferneze's daughters. Paolo marries Rachel. 



The plot is, of course, derived from the Aulularia and 
the Captivi of Plautus. For a discussion of it, see 
chapter V. 



A Tale of a Tub. 

Argument. — Young Squire Tub, of Totten Court, is in love with 
Audrey Turfe, whose father is constable in a neighboring village. 
Early in the morning of Valentine's day Canon Hugh arrives at Tot- 



Appendix. 97 

ten Court and warns the squire that Audrey is about to be married 
to a villager, John Clay. They arrange a plan of interfering with 
the wedding, and Tub fees the canon for his help. 

Sir Hugh then posts off to Justice Preamble, who is also in love 
with Audrey, and informs him that the girl is to be married, but that 
Squire Tub is planning to get possession of her. He suggests to the 
Justice a way of circumventing Tub, and gets from Preamble another 
fee for his intelligence. 

Meanwhile, Lady Tub, the Squire's mother, missing her sou, sends 
her servant, Martin, to hunt for him, and she herself also sets out 
with her maid. 

As the weddmg party is ready to go to church, it is broken up by 
the entrance of Hilts, Squire Tub's servant, dressed as if for a long 
journey. He announces that his master, one Captain Thums, has been 
attacked and robbed, and appeals to Constable Turfe to " raise the hue 
and cry " after the robbers. Of one of the robbers Hilts gives a descrip- 
tion that fits John Clay, and Turfe thereupon finds himself bound to 
arrest his son-in-law elect. Clay however, runs away and hides. 

In the confusion Squire Tub comes in and carries off Audrey, but 
is met b)' Preamble with his servant. Metaphor, in a borrowed pur- 
suivant's coat. Metaphor places Tub under arrest and Preamble 
goes off with Audrey, but at this moment Hilts reenters, and fright- 
ens Metaphor into confessing that the whole is a plot of Preamble's 
to get Audrey. Tub immediately seeks out Turfe and tells him that 
the whole affair of the "hue and cry" was an invention of Pre- 
amble's and that Preamble is about to marry his daughter. 
Turfe promptly pursues the pair, stops the marriage, and brings 
Audrey home again. 

Preamble and Hugh make another plot. Hugh, in disguise, goes 
to Turfe's house, presents himself as Captain Thums and accuses 
the constable of negligence in not finding the robbers. He carries 
the bewildered constable off to Preamble's house and the two con- 
spirators persuade Turfe that in default of producing Clay he must 
give Captain Thums a hundred pounds. Turfe authorizes Meta- 
phor to fetch the money from home, and thej^ add a whispered direc- 
tion to him to bring Audrey as well. 

Metaphor, however, as he is returning, again falls in with Hilts 
and Tub, who by mingled threats and bribes persuade him to leave 
the money and the girl with them. At this moment, however, Lady 
Tub enters, her suspicions are aroused at seeing her son with Audrey, 
and she summons him to go with her, while Audrey she entrusts to 
Martin to be taken home. 

The squire finally gets free of his mother, finds Martin and bids 
him dress out Audrey in Lady Tub's clothes and bring her thus dis- 
guised to Totten court, where the squire will marry her. He also 
invites Turfe and the other villagers to the house to see a masque. 

7 



98 Appendix. 

All assemble, among them Martin, bringing in Audrey, dressed 
like a fine lady. It is then discovered that Martin has outwitted the 
squire. Preamble and old Turfe, by marrying Audrey himself, and 
that Cannon Hugh performed the ceremony without recognizing 
Audrey. The other suitors, however, accept the inevitable, and the 
play ends with a masque, presented by two of the villagers, in which 
are set forth the day's adventures. 



The play, taken by Gifford for a work of the poet's 
old age, is now thought to have been one of his first 
efforts. ' The character of the play itself* would seem 
to bear this out, for there is no humor-study of the typi- 
cal Jonsonian sort. Yet, on the other hand, the useless 
allegorical touches in the treatment of metaphor are 
more like his later than his earlier work. There is little 
effort made to mark off the characters vividly, though 
the talk of the villagers, which is in dialect, gives a 
realistic touch. The source of the comic effects is in 
surprising incident, not in character contrast. Canon 
Hugh sets the plot going, and the first act presents the 
four elements of the action: (i) Turfe, with his plan to 
marry Audrey to Clay; (2) Squire Tub, planning to 
trick Turfe and marry Audrey; (3) Justice Preamble, 
planning to circumvent Tub, and marry Attdrey; (4) 
Lady Tub, bent on keeping her son from marrying. 
Audrey is passed about from hand to hand till Martin 
steps in and resolves the plot by marrying her himself. 
There is little satire in the play except the masque 
scenes, which ridicule Inigo Jones, and which were 
probably later interpolations. The play has, therefore, 
not the form of a satiric comedy: there is no distinct 
group of intriguers who successfully lay traps for the 
victims. There is, indeed, plenty of scheming and trick- 
ery, nearly every one is trying to trick some one else, 
but nearly every one gets tricked in turn, and at the 
end no one can laugh at his fellow or claim superiority, 
unless it be Martin, who by a lucky chance has won the 
prize. 



' Of. Cunningham's note, Works. I, pp. xin-xvii 



BIBLIOGRAPHY. 

Amiel, H. F. : Journal. London, 1889. 

Aristotle: Poetics. Ed. S. H. Butcher. London, 1895. 

Aronstein, Philipp: Ben Jonson's Theorie des Lust- 
spiels. Ang-lia, XVII (neue folge, V.) 

Brink, Bernhard ten: Five Lectures on Shakespeare, 
translated by Julia Franklin. New York, 1895. 

Buff, A.: The Quarto Edition of 'Every Man in His 
Humour.' Englische Studien, I. 

Coleridge, S. T.: Literary Remains. Ed. H. N. Cole- 
ridge. London, 1836. 

Congreve, William: Comedies. Ed. W. E. Henley. 
Chicago and London, 1895. 

Corbin, John: The Elizabethan Hamlet. London and 
New York, 1895. 

Corneille, Pierre: Oeuvres. Ed. Mary-Laveaux. Paris, 
1862. 

Dowden, Edward: Shakspere: A Critical Study of His 

Mind and Art. London, 1875. 
Everett, C. C: Poetry, Comedy and Duty. New York, 

1890. 

Fleay, F. G. : A Biographical Chronicle of the English 
Drama. London, 1891. 

Freytag, Gustav: The Technique of the Drama, trans- 
lated by E. J. MacEwan. Chicago, 1895. 

Friesen, H. Freiherr von: Ben Jonson, Eine Studie. 
Elze's Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesell- 
schaft, X. 

Haslewood, Joseph: The Arte of English Poesie. Lon- 
don, 1815. 

Hazlitt, William: Lectures on the English Comic 
Writers, Edited by his son. London, 1841. 



I oo Bibliography. 

Holthausen, F.: Die Quelle von Ben Jonson's Volpone. 
Ang-lia, XII. 

Jonson Ben: Works, with notes and a biographical 
memoir by W. Gifford, with introduction and ap- 
pendices, by F. Cunningham. London, 1875. 

Timber; or Discoveries. Ed. F. E. Shelling. Bos- 
ton, 1892. 

Best Plays. Ed. Brinsley Nicholson, with an intro- 
duction by C. H. Herford. London, 1893-94. 

Koeppel, Emil: Quellen-Studien zu den Dramen Ben 
Jonson's, John Marston's und Beaumont's und 
Fletcher's. Erlangen and Leipzig, 1893, 

Lamb, Charles: Dramatic Essays. Ed. Brander Mat- 
thews. New York, 1891. 

Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets. Lon- 
don, 1890. 

Longinus: On the Sublime. Translated by H. L. 
Havell, with an introduction by Andrew Lang. 
London, 1890. 

Meredith, George: An Essay on Comedy, and the Uses 
of the Comic Spirit. New York, 1897. 

Moliere: Oeuvres. Ed. Eugene Despois. Paris, 1876. 

Moulton, R. G : The Ancient Classical Drama. Ox- 
ford, 1890. 

Paget, Violet (Vernon Lee): Studies of the Eighteenth 
Century in Italy. London, 1887. 

Penniman, Josiah H.: The War of the Theatres. Bos- 
ton, 1897. 

Puttenham, George: The Art of English Poesie. In 
Haslewood's Ancient Critical Essays. London, 
1811. 

Reinhardstoettner, Carl: Spatere Bearbeitungen Plau- 
tinischer Lustspiele. Leipzig, 1886. 

Saegelken, Heinrich: Ben Jonson's Romer-Dramen. 
Bremen, 1880. 



Bibliography. loi 

Schmidt, I.: Ueber Ben Jonson's Maskenspiele. 

Schopenhauer, Arthur: The World as Will and Idea. 
Translated by R. B. Haldane and John Kemp. Lon- 
don, 1886. 

Sidney, Sir Philip: Defense of Poesy. Ed. Albert S. 
Cook. Boston, 1890. 

Swinburne, A. C: A Study of Ben Jonson. London, 
1889. 

Symonds, J. A.: Ben Jonson. New York, 1886. 

Votke, Th.: Ben Jonson in seinen Anfangen. Herrig's 
Archive, Band 71. 

Wilke, W.: Anwendung der Rhyme-test und Double- 
endings-test auf Ben Jonson's Dramen. Anglia, X. 

Wylie, L. J.: Studies in the Evolution of English Criti- 
cism. Boston, 1884. 



INDEX. 



Aristophanes, 8, 21, 22, 25, 26, 

27, 33- 
Aristotle, 11, 14, 15, 16, 19. 
Bacon, 13, 14, 32. 
Browning, 38. 
Coleridge, 36. 
Congreve, 14, 27, 34. 
Corneille, 16, ig. 
Cowlej'-, 12. 
Dekker, 84. 
Dion Cassius, 20. 
Donne, 6. 
Dowden, 17. 

Dryden, 6, 11, 12, 14, 19, 20. 
Freytag, 37. 
Gifford, 36, 82. 
Gilbert, 25. 
Hazlitt, 35. 
Hegel, 38. 
Horace, 14. 
James, Henry, 22. 
Jones, Inigo, 98. 
Jonson, Alchemist, 6, 16, 29, 31, 

36, 37.38, 46, 55- 60-4, 66, 67, 
68, 69, 71, 89; Bartholomew 
Fair, 29, 30, 31, 37, 38, 86-7; 
Case Is Altered, 16 (note), 
13~19- 87, 95-6; Catiline, 12. 

17. 31. 72; Cynthia's Revels, 
29- 30. 31. 32 (note), 33. 75, 82- 
83; Devil Js an Ass, 88-90 
Epicoene, 30. 31. 33. 36. 85-S6, 
8g; Evejy Man zn His Hit- 
moier, 17 (note), 29, 46-55, 64, 
73; Every Man Out of His 
Htimoiir, 6, 29, 31, 32 (and 
note), 35, 46, 49, 55-60; Mag- 
netic Lady. 37, 92-4; New 
Inn, 94-5; Poetaster, 7, 29, 
30, 31, 33. 84-5; Sad Shep- 
herd, 79; Sejanus. 12, 17, 

18. 19, 30, 31, 32, 66. 71, 72; 
Staple of News, 27, 90-2; 
Tale of a Tub, 96-8; Vol- 

pone, 6, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 36, 

37, 38, 46, 55. 64-72, 89. 
Juvenal, 8, 27. 
Longinus, 9 (note), 10, 11. 



Lyly, 12. 

Marston, 84. 

Massinger, 44, 45, 54. 

Menander, 26, 27, 33. 

Meredith, 25. 

Middlemarch, 38. 

Middleton, 44, 54. 

Milton, 7, 8, 14. 

Moliere, 8, 17, 21, 25, 27, 31, 34, 

37, 38. 75; ^Tarttcffe, 38, 68; 

Le MisantJirope, 68, 69, 

Moulton, 31, 83. 

Munday, Anthony, 74. 

Pater, 13. 

Plautus, 49, 53, 73, 78, 96- 

Puttenham, 5. 

Schelling, E., 12. 

Schopenhauer, 17. 

Seneca, 19, 73. 

Shakespeare, 5, 8, 18, 21, 22, 25, 

27. 32, 39. 40. 41. 43, 54. 73, 
78; AlVs Well that Ends 
Well i\\ As You Like It, 
40, (Rosalind and Celia), 
77; Comedy of Errors, 24, 
73, 75; Hamlet, 48, 49; King 
Henry IV, 26, (Falstaff) 23, 
24, 26; King Lear, 21; Love's 
Labour's Lost, 73, 74, 75; 
Merchant of Venice, 73; 
Merry Wives of Windsor, 
26; Midsummer Night's 
Dream, 40, 73; Much Ado 
about Nothing, 40; Romeo 
and Juliet, 41, 42; Twelfth 
Night, 40; Two Gentlemen 
of Verona, 41, 42, 73, 74-77, 
(Malvolio) 24, 26, 33. 

Sidney, 5, 6, 7, 9, 12, 27. 

Sophocles, 14, 18. 

Spenser, 5. 

Suetonius, 20. 

Swift, 27. 

Tacitus, 20, 27. 

Terence, 26. 27, 43, 44, 45, 53.54, 73- 

Upton, 36. 

Whalley, 36. 



ERRATA. 

Page lo, line 19. For we may learn, etc. . read "We may learn, etc. 

Page 13, line 27. For beautful r^art' beautiful. 

Page 14, line 26. After prescribe insert a period. 

Page 16, line 32. Delete the quotation marks. 

Page 23, line 17. After man insert a comma. 

Page 24. line 12. T^tr are read\%. 

Page 41, line 3. Tvr wished read wishes. 

Page 42, line 29. For severence r^rtd^ severance. 

Page 43, line 16. For are read is. 

Page 47, line 10. For Bobodill read Bobadill. 

Page 62, line 12. After Act delete the period. 

Page 85, line 5. For abhorrance rif*?;/ abhorrence. 

Page 89, line i. For reponds r^«rt? responds. 

Page 94, line 19 For the host's son. Frank as a lady read the host's 

son, Frank, as a lady. 

Page 98, line 4. For Cannon read Canon 

Page 99, line 16. For Mary-Laveaux read Mai-ty-Laveaux. 

Page loi, line 11. For Archive read ?iXQ\i\v. 



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